1 The neighbor dowsed our yard with a peach branch, watching it bend when he walked on water. Dad and I followed a few feet behind, out of his path. It was a science, well witching. He could find springs too. 2 The radiologist located, with a CAT scan, the area where blood had pooled …
When my father was twenty-two years old, one of his closest friends died suddenly. After the first few moments of shock wore off, my father remembered the night before. In his room, as he lay down to sleep, a ball of light appeared near the ceiling. Just like that. A ball of light hovered above …
Compact Jazz recording, 1989 Nina Simone, accompanying herself on piano Every instant is at once a giver and a plunderer. —Gaston Bachelard In 1980, my mother lay dying. Her death that July guided me north to a high Victorian mansion in upstate New York and, within just three days, to my beloved. He too was …
Everyone lived by thinking about flight. —Herta Müller In Milan a man imagines the devil. It is 1452, perhaps earlier. The Americas are only a merchant’s dream. The man holds a brush and a palette of egg yolk and dried red pigment. The duke is paying him to paint the Devil and the Tower and …
“I want to see some history.” -The Sex Pistols, “Holiday in the Sun” (1977) In January 1977, I move from Los Angeles to a fancy, old-fashioned London hotel suite, where I live with my mother and little brother for two months, long enough that we run out of money. We leave the city in March, …
A painting of the Virgin hangs at the foot of my bed. She wears her sacré coeur like a brooch, fastened with a sword through her chest. Mary’s sacred heart is crowned with flowers, just as gravestones are. I wish I were capable of such vulnerability; a provocateur, a coquette, a fetishist. She’s the foremost …
And like this my mother can stand, lost in thought over the slightest movement, a mere moment, five seconds, an old newspaper by the side of the road that lifts with the wind of a passing car, comes to rest again once it’s gone; the first potato that sprouts in the cellar and can soon …
(Between South Second Street and the Whitewater Gorge) I make my way along the old railbed where the train used to run on the eastern edge of the Whitewater Gorge. The train rolls through town on a different track now, but on quiet nights, or when the wind is blowing in the right direction, its …
When I am thinking about leaving my husband, my friend reminds me of that poem we both like where you sit and watch the boats on the horizon, which are all the lives you might have lived. When I am trying to decide what I want, out of the realm of what’s possible, I watch …
He’s waiting in the red Colt to pick up Rachel from her teaching job. She’s good with the seventh graders, the bright ones sprinting toward Ohio State, the ones who will drop out in a few years, the ones who will be pregnant soon, the ones who will die early in knife brawls or absurd …