I grew up in a house full of guys. Throughout most of my adolescence there were not a lot of moments where the finer points of being a female were taught. Instead I learned the not-so-subtle art of being a boy, like jumping fences, hopping apartment building rooftops, and learning how to take the pain of rough housing.
Here’s what the random word generator gave me: “copper, explain, ill-fated, truck, neat, unite, branch, educated, tenuous, hum, decisive, notice.” I was a detective working clues.
Waiting for Godot, Irish playwright Samuel Beckett’s two act play from the Theatre of the Absurd, is a quintessential primer to understanding politics under the Trump Administration.
I have to be honest. Even with a few dozen guns to my head, I don’t think I could choose just one decade for horror movies. If you ask me, it can’t be done, man.
There are decades that I like more than others. What I can’t do is choose the 70s over the 80s, or the 90s over the 60s. Or any decade over them all.
Pets and a garden work wonders as allies through transitions. I don’t mean large ones, like a death or a move or a birth, though I’m sure they’re good during those too, I mean quotidian ones to which you’d think you’d be able to adjust all by yourself, but in fact, without soft allies, you don’t.
Oracular the filtered light of oak
through her peignoir She comes to me as though
her spell was never broken I’m still twenty
I can smell those pungent oranges in the sun
The children appear from the edges. Their faces set. Their bodies are covered in iridescent powders that shimmer in hues that could only be seen in dreams. We have been gathered in the square to wait. Our kin have been gathered to watch. The children walk around us in a pack, sniffing, running towards us and back again to their circle. Worn, brown leather pouches hang around their necks, swaying with their movement.
I narrate to him that last night both partners
thought they’d given everything up for the other.
It was ugly. They didn’t get, they wouldn’t get,
what they’d hoped for. I editorialize
that I think rage is clichéd in marriage
after a decade and a half.
No one wanted to hang out with Janie anymore and I thought that was unfair. It could have been any number of things that turned the group off to her but in my book she was better than alright. Maybe I was being sentimental but Janie was one of ours and I wasn't ready to let her go.
There was a study done
to prove that men and women
have different brains
to prove, I suppose, that
women are from venus
and men are from mars,
that men want to fuck
and women want to marry
or some garbage like that
Look, I’ve been in and out of the newspaper business for going on a quarter of a century. I’m cool with that, I know I’m in a business going the way of coal-powered dodo birds, the telegraph, and professional jitterbuggers. If I’m the last one standing the day they stop rolling the presses, feel free to chisel it on my tombstone.
the drinking glass
you threw
across the room
shattered
against the wall
I had said
a wrong thing
that what is frozen roars for eternity (and that’s too much for us) while gashes in our wrists will bleed ceaseless, fluttering crimson ribbons.
"On with the American machine, down with grass and trees!" Dad said. I laughed, because, for fuck's sake, why was it time to turn the vacant lot next door into a new parking lot? The town was nothing BUT parking lots. We had just found out about the city’s decision, which gave me a helpless feeling.
she hits the keys
with one finger
like she’s jabbing someone
in the shoulder
or chest during
a fight because they
refuse to listen
It was inside the desk where she hid all of her secrets. On the surface were the objects that immediately spoke of the history she didn’t want to hide. The mahogany pencil boxed, handmade and carved with intricate leaves and vines, given to her by her grandmother on the day of her high school graduation; the framed photo of her grandmother, who did not live to see her college graduation; and her favorite coffee mug, the one she says she can’t work without.
So what do you do if you wake up and realize that the gently marinated and care fully crafted and harmoniously preserved memory of the you in your mind’s mirror first formed over twenty years ago, the you that was your most perfected self and doing the best impression of you that you have ever done, the you that you heretofore looked back on wistfully that existed before the stock market crashes and the psychotic ex and the security pat-downs and the parent-teacher meetings and the terrorism and the internet (parental controls, password changes, and screen pop-ups ‘oh my!’)…
“Who woulda thought the desert be this fucking cold?” He tried to raise his shoulders to his ears, but they kept shivering down. It hurt to look at the stars, they were so blistered white and scattered.
We wade in the middle of the still blue waters of Capo Caccia. Vivienne, who has taken a break from preparing lunch, tells me the story of the island’s most notorious brothers. She and her husband George have lived on their yacht in Bosa for the past fifteen years, and they have taken us out, Nick and me and three other couples, to spend the day exploring the island’s surrounding caves and capes. We are in unchartered territory.
oh, blundering human,
tripping forward,
turn around—
tread your life’s labyrinth
back to the beginning