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Romantic Love
Relationship Tips
I put aside the previous rejections and try again. This time I don’t mess around with coffee. I don’t want anything that might allow her a graceful out or result in a request to be friends. I have friends. I ask her on a dinner date.
October 2021
Taking Care
He sits on the mattress on the floor and unties his sneakers carefully. He spreads his laces to the sides of his shoes, as if they deserved respect.
July 2021The Other Side Of The Mountain
This was what it was like to do the work she did, to recognize the person in the dying body and to stay with them — like bearing witness to light moving through wreckage, stubborn and pure.
July 2021
Happiness
She liked classic rock and country, while I favored singer-songwriters with whispery voices and acoustic guitars. She teased me that this was typical of kids whose older parents had made them listen to Bob Dylan instead of Michael Jackson. In fact, my parents had usually listened to silence, but I liked her theory anyway, because it suggested that my personality was not my fault.
June 2021
Near The End
Without her glasses she couldn’t see, / so she’d touch her thumb to the bristles / of the two toothbrushes / to figure out which one I’d used, / then she would use the other.
June 2021Wanting Things To Be Different
A relapse of Lyme disease: / fever and chills, flickers of pain. / I want to sleep all the time, and my arms ache. / I lie on the steel grate that juts over the stream.
May 2021A stolen letter, a posthumous package, a Christmas card from a stranger
February 2021
Holidays
Chinese New Year in Philadelphia, Thanksgiving in Mexico, Passover in prison
November 2020
A Very Brutal Game
A man with the right scruffed-up beard and breadth of chest swaggered into the S and M dungeon that was my place of business, and twenty minutes and one grand later had my chin — still soft with the downy fluff of teen-girl skin — held steady in one paw while the other one flew at my face so hard and fast that I ceased to exist as the same collection of matter I had been the previous instant.
October 2020
