August 2018
A Normal Life
In a city as vast and changing as New York, can you ever recapture the past? Can you ever get away from it?
Chilindrinas
Down the hill I ran, rushed not by gravity’s trail, but the scent of kilned yeast and lard cutting clean through wet dirt air.
For Rachel—
For Rachel Wetzsteon, a poet who left the week I said good-bye to Manhattan, committing suicide just as I drove off.
If It Were Not So
As kids, we jumped on grandpa’s sinkhole, plywood-lined, dandruff-sporing bed and wore his chamber pot as a hat.
The Dead Aren’t Quaint
I gathered a bottle of roses and wore a rayon red dress and sat in the oldest cemetery I could find.
Sam and Joe
A dog is man’s best friend—until a little girl happens along who needs a best friend more.
Animal Mother
You love and give, and want it all, expecting nothing in return. Your kind’s love is as full of the angels’ as ours lacks of kindness.
The Night of the Train
To some, a train might signify adventure, or romance, or industry. What does it mean to a soldier fresh from Vietnam?
The Leaf Blower
Gusts crept from under the peeling, lower edges of Earth’s wallpaper, crawling out as potpourri of debris.
