from The Body Papers
One morning in the spring when I was seven years old, I woke up a puffy pink monster. My lips had disappeared into a mass of swollen flesh, my…
The Blue, an excerpt from Salvage: A Memoir
On the high shelves of my father’s salvage store in Provincetown, I sometimes spotted a glimmer of blue among his dusty collections of clam rakes, lanterns, chains, and anchors;…
My Father’s Teeth
My father saved his teeth by lying through them. Somewhere on the border between Russia and Poland, pines and rifles, in the nineteen-teens, he went off to the woods…
The Sharp White Background
Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine (Graywolf Press, 2014); Forgiveness Forgiveness by Shane McCrae (Factory Hollow Press, 2014). Claudia Rankine and Shane McCrae are both writers who directly,…
Vanishings and Returns
Second Childhood: Poems by Fanny Howe (Graywolf Press, 2014); Our Vanishing by Frannie Lindsay (Red Hen Press, 2014). New books by Fanny Howe and Frannie Lindsay explore facets…
Humping the Bush
There is a photograph of our father in an olive drab T-shirt and jungle fatigues, his still-plentiful hair clipped close to his head. He’s crouched on a bald knob…
AUDIO DESCRIPTION OF “A REALISTIC VIEW OF BOSTON COMMON” HOUSED IN THE MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, BOSTON
MEANWHILE, THE EYE RUNS AHEAD, THE MIND WANDERS This embroidery was made by a young American woman named Hannah Otis. Embroidered clouds, It depicts our…
La Vita è Bella
I know what happens in the end. I’ve seen the movie many times. The young son makes it. The father, he dies strutting cheerfully for his son in…
Fire in the Hole
Once I was air- borne, brief gust, thrown from the hot white metal of a car— do I have to go? I asked the paramedic. He buckled me…