When I was a six-year-old child, it was the eighties. I sometimes stayed overnight with my Grandma Virginia in the South Bronx. My Grandma Virginia only spoke English when she talked to people like me, people who can’t speak Spanish. I remember walking … [Read more...]
Are Made Of
You remember each new encounter, trying unsuccessfully to hold back the salivating. How your mouth shaped around every new one in an attempt to make itself one with it, tongue exploring crevices and ridges, curves and surfaces. The tints and tones, … [Read more...]
Body Bereft of Fitton Farm
1. Under a gray sky, the sun came around a corner like a drunk with a knife, a slice of light on the ruins of our childhood: the houses, sheds, barns, and junkyards that were once our farm on County Road 1800 East, Rantoul Illinois 61866. I say it in my … [Read more...]
Lexington Avenue
The span of Lexington Avenue between 25th and 29th streets is flanked on either side by Bangladeshi, Pakistani and Indian restaurants; by buffets of masala chicken and palak, floating in layers of oil. In between, there are Indian grocery shops … [Read more...]
The Accidental Monster: Salomé, Mom and Me
It is strange that the husband of my mother looks at me like that. I know not what it means. In truth, yes, I know it. —Oscar Wilde, Salomé When Oscar Wilde wrote Salomé in 1891, English law banned play performances involving biblical … [Read more...]
Icarus Regrets Every Tired Muscle
At the base of my spine glows an orange orb, free-floating amidst the Harrington rods and titanium cage. My low spine fused, my narrative nerves pinched and running the length of this mortal cord from sacral to skull. In between The Greenman, Jesus, Carl … [Read more...]
Scylla
Central Park in spring was magical. Leaves began to reappear on bare trees; the sun rose earlier—soft and shy—just waking up after winter, turning everything into a warm amber. It all looked new; even the benches glowed in a different kind of radiance. As … [Read more...]
Something About Rage and the Light Dying
I hadn’t killed us yet. My dad fidgeted next to me, exhaling loudly every few moments. Always a sensitive kid, I guess I was something of a Doppler radar of other’s emotions and my father’s nerves were transmitting microwave signals to my own. DNA to … [Read more...]
Conversations at Thresholds: a Contemplative Offering
I went for a walk this morning, as I do most days, before the sky held enough light to see in color. Morning joy is one of the most reliable sorts for me. Part of the appeal is living the visible, audible, gustable, tangible changes rung by the dawn. … [Read more...]
Love Song for a River Bank
The great wall of ancient growth slides its shadow across the river. Alder-cedar-redwood are the color of the afternoon water: serpentine. A breeze sweeps up from the sea. It picks out the leaves of the tanoaks one by one in gold; it turns up the volume … [Read more...]
The Mill Stones of History
My wife always thought that someday I’d be a big success. She talked about it since we got married, enthusiastically in the beginning, particularly when she became pregnant with our first daughter, less and less later, after she got pregnant again and we … [Read more...]
Richard’s Coat: Remembering Richard Irwin
Richard’s Coat… went into the cardboard box with all the other things for the thrift store: an orange radio with a broken antenna, a vintage purse that was only in fashion in San Francisco’s Haight Street where I had spent my younger days - some … [Read more...]
Aztec Summer
And after I got laid off from my teaching job in Michigan, I moved out to Portland and lived on unemployment and savings for almost two years, running my credit union accounts almost down to zero searching for another gig. When that didn't happen, I … [Read more...]
a toast to ti-jean in a liverpool gloom saloon
12 March 2018 It is said that a woman haunts, she sees everything. An observer, a writer, a siren of dreams. In my heart and mind, I am always searching for slivers of paradise while being silently pulled towards some sort of freedom I can’t quite … [Read more...]
The Muse Cuts: On Mental Health and Writing
My university lies at the center of a small farming town. It is a splotch of academia in the midst of many hay fields, and this year it has eleven thousand students. I’m here to learn creative writing, or really to hang out with creative writers. My … [Read more...]
Notes on the Sacred Art of Dog Walking
I read and reviewed Jim Harrison’s final collection of poetry, Dead Man’s Float, for the Missoula Independent in January of 2016. One of the first poems to strike me deeply is called “Notes on the Sacred Art of Log Sitting.” The poem, which is more prose … [Read more...]
(Part VI) Alison Winfield-Burns memoir
This is the final excerpt and contains chapters 11-Denouement. Here are all of the installments: Part I · Part II · Part III · Part IV · Part V · Part VI 11. Jack Kerouac School Revisited at Columbia … [Read more...]
Faleeha Hassan: My Life as a Refugee
Once my name appeared on a death list published in a number of newspapers and on some websites, I decided to flee Iraq and went first to the Turkish city of Eskişehir—on the advice of an Iraqi friend who lived there. I only lived there a month, however, … [Read more...]
Eight Hours
A man, who was leaving, asked me to write a story. He said he was going on an errand – a meeting with his accountant, a lunch with his cable guy, a high tea with a small herd of white rhinos – I wasn’t sure which. It was tax season. He promised to be back … [Read more...]
(Part V) Alison Winfield-Burns memoir
This excerpt contains chapters 8-10. Here are all of the installments: Part I · Part II · Part III · Part IV · Part V · Part VI 8. Homeless Newsreel (Charcoal Wool) Reader Road Map: homeless, … [Read more...]
How to Die Like You Meant It
“I don’t have long to live, and this is what heaven looks like,” I thought as I lay on my back, my breath freezing to my beard in the minus 3 temperature, the hard, dirty snow between the boxcars glowing in diffuse light. It was dawn, it was the coldest … [Read more...]
Animals, Seven Days Old
I. I start at the cheek, the slope slowing into the area where eyes rest. The dip of the chin, gray’s muted hue, smog on jaw. The ear, hair sheltering it. Eyebrows, eyes and the gleam trapped … [Read more...]
(Part IV) Alison Winfield-Burns memoir
This excerpt contains chapter 7, in which Alison spends time at the Kerouac School in Boulder, then continues her adventures in Rome. Here are all of the installments: Part I · Part II · Part III · Part IV · Part V … [Read more...]
(Part III) Alison Winfield-Burns memoir
This excerpt contains chapters 5 and 6, which detail Alison's experiences at the Kerouac School in the early 1980s and her later homelessness at Columbia University. Here are all of the installments: Part I · Part II · Part III · … [Read more...]
Dearly Beloved, Part II: Growing up in Bohemian 1950s San Francisco
You can read Part I of Nanette's memoir of growing up in 1950s San Francisco here. I begin to make a habit of snuggling down behind the Shoji screen with a "Minka." I hold my breath when my mother comes looking for me to help with the … [Read more...]
White Jesus – A reflection on summer camp and Charlottesville
Growing up in Kansas, from about 9 to 12 years old, I went to Christian summer camp down the highway in rural Missouri. I loved it there. We swam in creeks and caught crawfish. I played soccer and made friends. There was a zipline that ran through the … [Read more...]
Panic Drapes the Look of the World: Literary Treatment for Anxiety in an Uncertain Age
1. June, 2016: I was having a panic attack while I walked the dog after dinner. Children rode skateboards and scooters in that last yellowed hour before bedtime. I felt unreal to myself, and the Denver streets I’d known my whole adult life seemed false … [Read more...]
Edward Albee Speaks
I heard that Edward Albee was giving a workshop at the Omega Institute. I attempted to sneak in using my press credentials, but Omega politely explained that "all the slots are filled." So I resolved to meet Albee at his book-signing following the … [Read more...]
(Part II) Alison Winfield-Burns memoir
This excerpt contains the middle of Chapter 2 through the beginning of Chapter 5, starting with childhood and going up to Alison's arrival in the early 1980s at the Kerouac School. Here are all the installments: Part I · Part II · Part … [Read more...]
(Part I) The School(girl) of Disembodied Poetics by Alison Winfield-Burns
This is the first excerpt of six. Here are all of the installments: Part I · Part II · Part III · Part IV · Part V · Part VI “I wrote my memoir at the request of my sweetheart Sam, who said he wanted to ‘know … [Read more...]
Spring in Cascadia
Ten days in the northwestern bit of the USA — a sort of slow-paced quick visit to a part of the world I've wanted to see for so long. On the way, I managed to spend five days with my friends Tim and Stephanie in Bellingham, hiked with my sister's … [Read more...]
Plain Sight
Behind a scarred metal door, painted red and inset with two locks that opened to keys in shapes I never saw in the States, including one that looked like the Philips head screwdriver on my old swiss army knife, my Lviv apartment was laid out like gilded … [Read more...]
The Seed
The sun beat down on my parents’ black Olds as they drove south to their honeymoon in Florida. It was 1937. My father could easily have afforded a new car which cost $540 then. He made plenty of money in the grocery store he owned in Jackson Heights in … [Read more...]
Being There
Summer, 2004 We had never gone away together, never taken a vacation. My mother had always been too busy cleaning houses, changing diapers, and dating worthless men. But she made time, one summer, for us to go somewhere, be somewhere and escape our day … [Read more...]
Subterranean Boy
There was a time that I fell in love once: with life, slowly with myself, and with a beautiful boy who completely turned my world upside down. A beauteous man child who taught me about life and love and artistic vision as salvation, a stunning combination … [Read more...]
All Night You Dream of Ice and In the Morning Wake to a Skiff of Snow
After all these weeks of rain and gray, the sky a fitted sheet on the too bulky mattress of mass, last night there were white blossoms in the trees and snow on the earth and your hair grew long and light-filled and you rode through town on a polar bear. … [Read more...]
The Only Man in the World
DADIO SPLIT FOR MOLOKA’I every weekend to supervise his Puko’o project. He was certain his pick-and-shovel laborers and heavy equipment operators were slacking off. I took turns with Troy, my big brother, serving as his assistant. We carried luggage, … [Read more...]
Under His Roof
At 19, just out from under my father’s roof, I was in an antique shop, a secondhand shop really, eyeing a copper teakettle. “Sit!” the owner said sharply. I sat. Then I saw a large dog, a Standard Poodle, behind me. The owner had been talking to his … [Read more...]
Marshmallow Forest
Mud hardens on my combat boots as I step behind my sister through the sickle of woods dividing her property from her neighbors. The son of the previous owners, born intellectually disabled and fond of motors, rode a four-wheeler across this pathway … [Read more...]
Dearly Beloved, Part I: Growing up in 1950s San Francisco
In San Francisco, a handsome old Lutheran Church is for sale. My "Beat Generation", progressive, bohemian, intellectual, Jewish, left-leaning, scholarly, non-conformist, art professor parents, Leonard and Helen Breger, are deeply devout prolific artists. … [Read more...]