The Velvet Queen in Sternum
Tandem visions of our chests in waves of bone. I find myself aware of the bones in my ribs, the bones in my sternum. When I lose and gain weight, I...
epitaphs #5, #19, #40
here lies a man who lost his virginity during his senior class trip to Grand Bahama Island but thanks to the storms that had gone before them their...
A Bridge and a Bouquet
I wasn’t even sixteen yet, and I could see my mother’s expression of ‘my daughter is getting older’. I didn’t know whether to shift my...
The Little Chairs
The men in my family are gone. My uncle, a software programmer for IBM who made the same Thanksgiving dinner every year since 1987 from a menu in Esquire,...
How much does the audience get to know?
And yet on the other hand, being a memoir writer apparently, to a lot of people, means that your entire personal life is fair game. Because...
The Past in Nonfiction
Suzanne Berne writes about her search for a grandmother she never knew, a mother her father never knew: her grandmother died when her father was a little...
An interview with Mary Roach
Roach: "The whole wall behind his desk was filled with television screens of eyes that were currently being operated on! So, I’m trying to interview him, and behind...
On the Music of Distraction
The pitch of the accordion begins low in the dark, but as the spotlight slowly focuses, I see the bellows of the instrument open up, the top ahead of...
I’d Like to Talk About the Bigger Stuff
Today, in leafing through a bundle of letters to Kyrgyzstan, postmarked in Colorado, a sense of guilt begins to build. The feeling that I abandoned this...
When You Told Me It Wasn’t a Honeymoon
So we stayed on the trail and followed it down through the brush and over a rushing stream with soaked stones the color of chicken skin. Above us, the...