Browse Topics
Adolescence
Shock Value
In general my job was predicated on my ability to suppress rage. I was an itinerant instructor, an adjunct whose career depended on good reviews from my co-instructor.
May 2023
All-American
My perceived faults would be erased the day I donned the letter jacket that bore my last name across the back, all my inconvenient vowels blazing, with Cheerleader in a semicircle underneath.
April 2023
The End Of The World
Maybe the end of the world wasn’t fire and explosions and lawlessness and bodies in the streets. Maybe the end of the world was some smaller thing.
February 2023
Vanished
Where do those lost socks / go? The ones that vanish / between washer and dryer, / submerge in suds and never / surface again?
December 2022We Fools
When Nonna Venere visited, she arrived by train like in a movie, stepping down from the first-class compartment enveloped by smoke, wearing a cloche with a veil. She had four large suitcases and no gifts.
November 2022
Bottom Feeders
I feel close to Dad on the drive home, our legs mud-dry and tired, the tackle box between us, the pillowcase full of fish and ice. She’ll never admit it, but Mom will be impressed, I’m sure. In a million years she’d never guess how we caught so many. I’ll never tell.
October 2022
Somebody’s Baby
We can see, if we care to look, that the way we treat children — all of them, not just our own, and especially those in great need — defines the shape of the world we’ll wake up in tomorrow.
September 2022A Private Thing
People laugh about pubescent horniness and untimely erections, but nobody talks about getting them before puberty on a regular basis. I was aroused whenever nothing was demanded of my limbs or mind — in class, at church, on the bus, in the car. Once, I even got hard at football practice while staring off at the Catskill Mountains and half-assing my way through groin stretches.
September 2022
Learning The Hard Way
Hitching a ride, trusting a partner, marrying the same person three times
September 2022
Sunbeams
September 2022The roots of a child’s ability to cope and thrive, regardless of circumstance, lie in that child’s having had at least a small, safe place (an apartment? a room? a lap?) in which, in the companionship of a loving person, that child could discover that he or she was lovable and capable of loving in return.
