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 earlobes were triple their usual size, and my cheeks were … Read More
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; that flash of color always made me feel guilty. When … Read More
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 with two other boys to visit the village horses hidden … Read More
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, clearly, and pointedly approach the past and present injustices inherited … Read More
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 of faith and aging. A passage from the title poem … Read More
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 of rock, the shade of loblolly pines darkening one side … Read More
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 own Boston Common with Beacon Hill in the background. … Read More
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 front of the Nazi’s rifle. But let me delay … Read More
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 to the gurney, raised me into the ambulance. The … Read More