I used to love running when I was a freshman in high school. The PE teacher would say “1, 2, 3, go!” and I’d be an instant blur, dashing toward the hundred-yard line as my classmates lagged behind me. My hair haloed my head, my cheeks glowed red, I was a morning person. And even […]
New Age pundits will say that the point of power is where you take what life gives you and respond to it in constructive ways rather than reacting to what someone else has done or failed to do Nobody can make you feel anything curtly says the life coach who brandishes a sheet of paper […]
If I return to the dream, I understand that it began in chaos. It always begins in chaos. I take a bus to a hospital in Brooklyn. I remember what I'm wearing: a somewhat formal slinky blue dress, but my shoes are tattered, white, scuffed up like the patent leather slip-ons I used to wear […]
“I’m sorry, I didn’t know the dangers of an underworld journey,” Prosperina muttered, her head bowed so low that her gaunt, tightly drawn face seemed to disappear into the silver webbing of her ceremonial cloak. “I’m sorry I failed you…and the sacred order.” The Hiereia didn’t immediately respond. Instead, she waved a thurible of incense […]
Hi hun, it’s soooo great to see you. It’s been way too long! You look amazing. Seriously. I’m not just blowing sunshine up your ass. I remember what it was like to be a new mom. I barely had the energy to get up and shower. But you brushed your hair and everything. I’m impressed. […]
Where you are is your garden. Plant the seeds that please you here. Draw your sense of purpose from the soil and trees, the rocks and clouds, the murmuring frogs and hopping squirrels. Do not leave yourself. If there is any genius that lives within the brittle net of your flesh, it is the porous […]
I hate the love I feel for you Not because you don’t deserve it That much is evident from your prolonged absences And casual insertions of self Into the otherwise spacious parentheses of my day I hate the love I feel for you Because it’s a sign of my weakness I’m not talking feminine weakness […]
Wedges of white bread with the crusts torn off topped with sun-bright circles of cooled egg yolk often became my meager substitute for the heaping piles of meat that constituted any worthy feast at least in the books I read If I couldn’t have sausage or pastrami rippling with fat and the exertion of the […]
In my journey yesterday, I asked what I need to do in order to be more courageous. I saw three black birds fly in an isosceles triangle overhead. I noticed the word CUNEO mounted in fading capital letters atop an old brick building. I saw a small biracial girl dance along the street in her […]
There was a fantasy that would enact itself, constantly and clandestinely, in the back of my head at the age of 11 or so. Instead of setting foot in the girls’ locker room, to the accompaniment of brash pubescent voices and taunts—or the vast green field, which lay between crowds of stone-eyed middle schoolers and […]
