“Do you want to keep this?” I asked, holding the box of Christmas ornaments.
“No, no room.”
I decided to keep it.
“What about these family photos?”
“No, it’s not like I’m ever going to look at them again. I probably forgot half the people in there!”
I keep that box, too.
I’m the only one who wants to hold on to our family, keep some mementos from our lives, our history.
I weep as my parents fill the dumpster with my past.
Now we have no family home.
We just have the memories so sharp they cut like glass.… Read the rest
“The first time I saw it I was brushing my hair after a shower. I turned just so and saw in the mirror the dark spot on my shoulder.
“My husband said it looked like a bruise, but it just kept getting worse.
“The bruise turned into a boil, and then that was lanced, so I had an open wound. Then they had to care for it daily, and I lived for months in this constant agony until my flesh just started rotting away.”
“My God, do you know what did it?”
“Yeah. I shouldn’t have cheated on my husband.”… Read the rest
… Read the rest“Everyone wants to give a writer the perfect notebook. Over the years I’ve acquired stacks: one is leather, a rope of Rapunzel’s hair braids its spine. Another is tree-friendly, its paper reincarnated from diaries of poets now graying in cubicles. One is small and black as a funeral dress, its pages lined like the hands of a widow. There’s even a furry blue one that looks like a shag rug or a monster that would hide beneath it—and I wonder why? For every blown-out candle, every Mazel Tov, every turn of the tassel, we are handed what a writer dreads
It’s hard to find butterflies here, or even flies.
There are bees, though, they’re always hanging around Washington Square Park, buzzing around the sticky sweet juice dripping down your hand from the popsicle you got at the ice-cream stand.
You block out the sound of traffic and listen to the rasta drum beats and smell the weed that’s everywhere now, and the whole time this warm breeze of city filth swirls around you.
In the middle of the biggest city you find a flower ridiculously alive, crawling from a crack in the concrete.
It’s the bravest thing you’ve ever seen.… Read the rest
