Photo by Rene Böhmer on Unsplash One of us hears from her last week at a Crisis Prevention Meeting. One of us hears her speaking in Ainu. It isn’t Ainu we decide because it is also dying or dead by some reports. It must be pieces of many languages strung together with a syntax more […]
Photo by Yoksel Zok on Unsplash A daffodil. A blanket. A bike. A pink geode exploding with crystals. A pair of ducks paddling upstream. An oatmeal cookie made by a woman who has been making them for 70 years. A tender, young branch from an apple tree. A gift. An offering. A conch shell smooth […]
A forager once told me that an attempt is an illusion. Under the roof of a tent, lands become vast rooms of solitude, fluttering like the hanging man in the middle of the square. When I told my friend what the forager told me, he said that he’s bipolar and that an attempt is the […]
Photograph by Jon Flobrant I was dreaming of three forks in the river. Between us, there are eight names, so our daughter will have the longest name in history, the same name as this river. I have loved everyone with such an embarrassing grip, even through the night. When I woke I felt we had […]
Photo by Daryan Shamkhali on Unsplash 1. Judenfrage We visited my grandmother Roberta once per season while growing up, always in her crowded Brooklyn apartment. It was almost a three-hour drive from our house outside Philly, but my grandmother never smiled when we arrived. Even when her husband was still alive, she sat away from […]
Long ago, my mother lost her French, and with it all memory of her upbringing in Franco-American Lewiston, Maine. This was why we had come to Maine that summer—not so much to capture a frisson of lost language but to recover memories, as if to grasp them like so much detritus sprayed upon the shore. […]
Photo by Kevin Seibel on Unsplash The summer I was pregnant, I watched with growing detachment as my breasts asserted themselves and my spreading hips echoed my mother’s. I had the urge to nest—procuring diapers and wet wipes, obsessively dusting, developing a sudden, unexpected interest in scrapbooking—and became, for a short while, someone I […]
Photo by Jon Sailer on Unsplash Something there, smaller and meaner than before— where the palm of the hand rests on the collarbone— ails me. I’m sure that’s where the shame is. How it shrank like an old walnut, what was once the locust-heart of summer. The meadowlark’s V for victory over the yellow […]
Photo by Umanoide on Unsplash The orchestra ambushes me with Mahler’s Fifth. I never played; I have no innate sense of music, so it’s a shock to feel the brass ransack my body. Stop I rasp when the trumpets make my edges blur and a solo horn tugs my soul through my throat. Stop. […]
Photo by Mick Haupt on Unsplash I must remember to open the cabinet of forgotten things. That’s where the bottles are. Bottles of solutions that enhance memory. Or do they stoke the imagination? I think I recall the lock’s combination. Isn’t it the date of a French king’s death? Or the net worth of […]