Author Archives: Katie Sticca

  As we snake up through redwoods into the thickening gold haze, my brother the firefighter wonders how long to get a first responder out here, where the sheer gravel road shrinks at random to a single lane, and his … Read More

  We go to Golden Gate Park to have a picnic. Find a patch that is empty, our clearing. Don’t realize until a ball almost bursts the bottle of Bulleit that we are in the middle of the golf course. … Read More

  thunderstorms forming, kids out of school and off to camp, brand new ringtones loaded on phones. Another famous overdose, another fading star on trial, a governor-gone-wild all sexier stories than missiles on the move, protesters bleeding in streets of … Read More

  after Edouard Manet   A young woman with a cigarette—perhaps a prostitute! Or maybe she’s a “shopgirl hoping for company,” but either way, she’s not an upper-class lady, sitting there alone and ungloved. And next to her cigarette hand … Read More

  It’s what we don’t say that holds us together. In the late afternoon, walking along the Danube we talk about the hills and the color of the water, the street names as foreign and clumsy in our mouths as … Read More

  In the living room my mother can’t sleep. Past midnight, reading a magazine, she eats her way to the bottom of the plate. A swirl of lithium carbonate has thinned into her blood. It’s not enough to make her … Read More