My mother used to say that the gods were crying when it rained; my father said that they were pissing. That was in the early 2000s, when the news reported on the dangers of acid rain. Singaporeans fooled themselves into believing that the rain smelled sharp and sour, that it pockmarked the concrete sidewalks. Rain …
My friend Michael sends photos of his new flat in the old city. Twenty years on, Lisbon’s alleys are slick with renovation and rain, the stucco of the old squats livid in sunflower yellow. The stone floors are centuries old, but his place is dustless, with a real zebra-hide rug that he’s been dragging from …
Fridays became the day I drove in the late morning from Aurora to Ithaca to see Bruce. Our relationship was limited to the hours we spent in the church he and his wife were renovating—and when he was my professor in our creative writing class. We never left the church and were never seen together. …
What’s past is prologue.—Shakespeare, The Tempest 1. 365 Clare Island rises like a rumpled green wizard’s hat at the edge of Clew Bay, a single slouching mountain off the Irish coast framed by the open Atlantic. My backpack and I are gliding toward the island’s quay on the afternoon ferry, under wildly bright August sun. …
Italicized lines are from James Joyce’s Ulysses (Random House, 1986 reissue). ms cuello cause she never give up on me even though theres no hope I liked the way I was portrayed in the note. I saved it in an overflowing binder filled with thank-you notes from students. I had no idea who wrote it. …
My friend Don told me about how his mother passed into death. A tough Italian American, strict and scolding, she became pliable as she neared her end. She gentled and gave up all her fights. Don, her primary caregiver, was there when the death rattle came to her throat. “You can go now,” he said …
Cradle Catholic. Spicy chrism, baptism, incense, First Communion in a white dress, black burned palm fronds crunching across my forehead as the priest drew the Ash Wednesday cross. Belief was my heritage, passed down from immigrant grandmothers who kept cauldrons of chicken blood simmering on the stove. Rituals, saints, gore. Jesus bleeding openly, his eyes …
I remember that summer before junior year, how Catherine and I lay side by side on a grassy knoll in downtown Charlottesville, watching the Fourth of July fireworks, whispering between booms. Children of rural suburbs, we felt stranded, too far from downtown to get mixed up in the college-kid mayhem and not deep enough in …
Right in front of the staircase leading to the college library doors, a huge vertical bronze wrist leaned slightly backward, its fingers half-opening, half-closed, its palm pierced through with a massive bronze nail. “Here’s the Hand of Christ,” I told Victor. I searched his face, wondering what he was thinking about our Catholic college replete …
In early March 2020, on my last visit to the Carnegie Museum of Art, I waited for the one o’clock tour at the bottom of the stairs leading to the galleries. The docent arrived and led our little group up the staircase, to the galleries on the left, as she shared bits of trivia about …