Suddenly I’m remembering a public conversation between two Great Straight White Male Writers. We’ve all made the mistake of going to this event at least once, right? After Great Straight White Male Writer 1 reads, it’s time for the Q&A. This is where we’re supposed to find profound insight. The questions are always the…
February creeps. The date like a pregnant moon circled round on my calendar. But I do not even know what to wish for. When I tell my oldest friend this, she says, “Sometimes they shit bomb them,” thethey being other inmates; thethem being my father’s kind. She says this from a distance, as if…
1. Sweets My father was a dentist, so I was allowed only one sweet a day. The reasons for this restriction were not mysterious. The water in our town wasn’t fluoridated. When my father tried to convince his fellow citizens they should add this chemical to the well, they accused him of fomenting a Commie…
Syria is the country where I first began to hike. I had moved there from the US with my husband in the early 2000s to the approving nods of the elders of my family. Before then, I’d only gone on visits, to see relatives and learn the language. My move was supposed to be a…
1. I know where I came from, born up out of the half shell dog house, roof tin fence rusted right into summer. The bended sag of the wire gate, the warm rustled fur, the worn-down dirt, the dog shit, and all of us, blind pups and children, new in our bodies, snuffling for mothers…
In Trinidad, the police have so much power, and they are so young. How to Wear the Uniform The police uniform is a cruel piece of work, the sleeved gray shirt a punishment of thick, rough wool and polyester in the Caribbean heat. Starched to the pliancy of grade-two cardboard, it invites an itchy ring…
I have read enough about the fundamental complexity of all things, down to the very protons and neutrons, to feel at ease saying this: Beauty disciplines. I know my two-word sentence is not intelligible by conventional standards. I hope by means of it to move a little beyond these standards and to begin to justify…
At twenty-five and with little direction in my life, I decided to volunteer in a soup kitchen. Several years after graduating college, things had fallen into a quarter-life stability: I was living in Boston, working as an administrative assistant at a nonprofit, making enough money to cover expenses and go out to dinner and drinking…
“I had to get away from her,” my husband whispered as we lay together in bed. For thirty years, I’d heard only his sharp, flinted words, the stories about his mother no more than a few terse sentences—“She sacrificed me to my stepfather. She let him beat me. She beat me too”—his resentment flaring on…
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