Yesterday it looked like a funeral procession. Today I sit in the procession, a hundred cars deep in each direction. The line staggers a quarter mile from Trader Joe’s, to just past Riverside Chapel. We’re here to test for...
Read MoreJake’s back in the hospital, again. A battle erupted on his island of schizophrenia, again. Throwing trays at nurses, again. Nowhere to go but the streets, again. A veteran with traumatic brain injury. An alcoholic. Rejecting...
Read MoreYour figure looks younger than it is. A story I’ll dissect in days and weeks to come, until I know by heart every syllable. Candy apple gloss on your fingers and toes glams of anything but death. A night two-stepping in San...
Read MoreMembers of the selection committee: I have come a long way from my working class roots. My father supervised the night shift. Even though I was a girl, my father trusted me to keep tabs on my mother when he was at work. So, from...
Read More(In August 2018, airport employee Richard Russell, who had no prior flight experience, entered an empty plane, took off, flew around, performed some aerial maneuvers, vomited, spoke his final words, and crashed into a small...
Read Moreshe climbs high on a rickety machine, its rusty pipes haphazardly cobbled, and I bark into the air, Laura, come down from there! She climbs higher. I awake with her sleeper’s breath on my cheek, still flushed with astonishment...
Read More(High school, 1958) collective grunts on browned grass playing fields never bridged those unlike me. black sons of storefront preachers; buzz-cut blonds; serb exiles — boy squads split by strangeness, marching canyoned...
Read More“Heir to Misfortune,” Washington Post (2016) Turns out he’s afraid I’ll get better and leave him alone to suffer our disease. So I said, gnarling the words: maybe you won’t play violin any more. But you can sing. And damn, right...
Read More[A] 150-year-old map depicts the Battle. . .not with the usual scenes of charge and counter-charge, but as one vast cemetery. — Washington Post (2020) Stretched in ranks like nervous enfilades the sunken mounds,...
Read MoreThe smell in the bath towel I use to dry my hair today reminds me of the chlorine and hot Sacramento sun at Clunie Pool, and I am six years old again in my shirred nylon orange suit, petrified of the swimming teacher who said he...
Read MoreWhen your father died and then your mother six months later, you and your sisters and brothers gathered to ready their house for selling. I could see all of you had to do it quickly, like emergency surgery. Although your parents...
Read Moreon a winter afternoon in 1976 while running from my life in California, barely able to croak out my need for relief from a chest cold I feared was turning into something worse, I saw the pharmacist turn, look me up and down,...
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