When the time comes, it should be easy: Dump your clothes at Goodwill, throw out the old mattress, recycle the chair, take home a few letters, a knickknack or two; you didn’t have much. But what happens to my memories? They’re not so easily dispatched: Your shining eyes as a gleeful two-year-old; at three, your delight, so cocky, parading your new hat; at four, your beaming face when your […]
There comes a time In each woman’s life when Makeup no longer enhances. I saw this in Mom, Painstakingly applying mascara, lipstick But no longer able to see the blotch, the blur Or that her face now looked oddly askew. She was pleased with herself Until Dad, distraught from seeing her so unable, Lost his small portion of patience, And snapped, Nancy! You have to wash your face! […]
We sat on a bridge in my hometown, shook off our shoes, swished our skirts. Bare feet on a summer afternoon feel a lot like freedom; something talked about and then forgotten in the discomfort of the day-to-day. We talked about Esther’s figs, how the future seemed so spread out, our choices incomprehensible. We talked about our missing pieces. We were so young. I told you I thought that inside […]
My tongue tastes like dirt and is sluggish as a swollen earthworm. Bones ache and arms flop uselessly, noodles that stick to every surface. I look in the mirror and see a can of red spaghettios, but food doesn’t interest me and neither does color. I’d like to paint my meatballs yellow, but I can’t figure out how to use a brush. Today I cannot make myself care about customer […]
Your friends live far away, scattered across cities and states. Sometimes you call to say I miss you, but then silence spins itself out across the wire, meanings lost behind sighs and half-stories. Mostly you do not call them, because you are tired, and it is tiring to miss people whom you cannot reach, who live in cities you cannot get to because you are poor and busy, and when […]
My mother calls and asks the date. She wants to write a check and doesn’t have it right. The lines jump around and she can’t find her place once she looks up– Wasn’t there an envelope to put the check? What happened to the pen? – then down again. Who’s it for? I ask, a test. She can’t quite recall. Ira, I remind her. I don’t […]
n. an imaginary interview with an old photo of yourself Me: Look how your bones bend skin the way each rib rises to the surface, the horrific simplicity of starvation. Me: Day breaks across me like glass, my frame scraped clean of calories. Me: You will regret the ruins you are building, The sallow skin, the carefully crafted sorrow. Me: They misunderstand me: mothers, ministers, […]
seems disconnected from her brain. When she tries to explain her drowsiness, she tells her doctor, I fell asleep on Friday and didn’t wake up till Christmas. Embarrassed, she stammers … I mean, Sunday! … until Sunday. And when tries to say she cleans her nose with a Q-tip, out slips, toothpick. Her tongue has a mind of its own. She imagines it scanning grey matter, seizing any random word […]
with her son. He’s as peculiar as she, but he’s unaware. Puffed with delusion, he curses the cop who pulls him over—a peon who makes less than a quarter his salary. And, lately, he harbors strangely fascist ideas. Impressed with his own knowledge, he scoffs at acupuncture, hypnotism, hyperbaric chambers, anything he has not experienced. When the madwoman hears researchers found a link between cell phones and brain cancer, she […]
over symmetry, asks again and again if one eye, ear, breast, thumb, ankle is larger, longer, redder, stiffer or sharper than the other. The madwoman’s every ache is a tumor; every short breath, a heart attack; every gas pain, appendicitis; every muscle cramp, blood clot; and every red eye, imminent blindness. She won’t use public toilets or visit the sick at home or in hospital. She reads articles on rare […]
Melancholy Hyperbole 