If you ever happen to be in St. Louis, and you take Highway 40 to the western edge of the city, you will spy, looming above the Clayton Road exit, the world’s largest Amoco sign. Forty feet tall, sixty feet wide, the sign is so big and so bright that, according to local legend, pilots once used it to guide their flights in and out of Lambert Field.
The Hare Krishnas would be coming out in good time to sing and dance for everyone and everything. I was eight in the summer of 1985, vacationing with my silent generation relatives in Ocean City, MD, in an apartment on First St. at The Haven Hotel. Poppy knew how much I loved to sing and dance. He got some bells.
When I received the news that I had received a scholarship to study on a year-long Arabic programme in Cairo, my initial excitement was misplaced. The promise of exploring this crazy city and building a new network of connections energised me. I bombarded friends with experience living in Cairo with requests for recommendations: historical sites, ruins, restaurants, hip neighbourhoods. I wanted to see it all. Immediately.
As I step through the library door, a soft, comforting scent drifts toward me, leaving me feeling calm. Dad whispers, “Have a look around. It is truly remarkable. I’ll be in this main room if you need me.” As I look around, I quickly realize Dad was right. This library is not like any other I’ve ever seen. It is special.
Much of my writing, in fiction and poetry, has been deeply influenced by the imagery of painting and cinema. I have always been very much attracted to the ways in which language can create visualizations of things, people, and events.
Since Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s nomination to run the Department of Health and Human Services, many journalists have swiftly denounced his views, backing up their statements with scientific studies to combat his misinforming the public. The effect of these denouncements is that his ideas are so obviously false and dangerous.
These few days, the assassination of the CEO of UnitedHealthcare has become the center of attention of the media, and the talking points extend to the injustice of America’s private insurance system introduced to patients. I am staying in Taiwan now since September and have gone through the healthcare treatment many times for my injured knee and chronic problem of Spondylolisthesis. I would like to talk about my own experience enjoying a healthcare system that’s totally different from America’s.
The 2024 presidential election’s over: I’m starting to sleep better again; my blood pressure is returning to normal. It didn’t surprise me that Donald Trump won the election; it just appalled me.
It didn’t surprise me that during the campaign, Trump supporters saw those of us that opposed his election to president as the enemy; nor did it surprise me that we saw Trump supporters as stupid, naïve pawns.
It did surprise me, though, to learn that my girlfriend was the enemy.
A generation of kids wanders into a DIY venue and gets their fill of drugs relevant to their generation and locale. Blues, speed, blow in Denver it’s cheap grass. And the ever-present booze. Piles and piles of discarded PBR, Miller High Life, and Rolling Rock cans with a few of the well-off kids’ craft beers thrown in for good measure. An aluminum salvager’s wet dream.
I swam in the Ganges, source of life to a billion bipeds, golden, striped in a horizontal blue crayoned by a dreamy child. My parents, like all teleosts, were indifferent about my birth, abandoning my siblings and me, but I grew in a chorion cradle, nourished by yolk, a pulsing sphere.
If you’re reading this, it’s only because it has passed through the net of editorial scrutiny. Presumably, an editor or editors have sharpened the argument, eliminated irrelevancies, tightened the prose, and reined in my more intemperate claims.
January 6, 2021, marked a pivotal moment in American history, serving as a wake-up call and a profound division. The shocking scenes of rioters breaching the Capitol stirred a visceral reaction across the nation. While the vast majority of Americans were horrified by the chaos, the interpretations of that day have since diverged sharply.
My cellphone dinged — it was an Instagram reel from my sister, Glynn. I opened the link and glamorous 1950s movie star Cyd Charisse filled my screen, dancing ecstatically in a shimmering yellow dress, surrounded by perfectly synchronized dancers.
Due to historical persecution of queer individuals, trauma pervades queer lives, communities, and literary representation. Given the prevalence of trauma in queer narratives, can queer protagonists define themselves beyond the atrocities they face? In his epistolary novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019), Ocean Vuong demonstrates that while trauma fundamentally shapes the queer Vietnamese American protagonist, Little Dog, he is equally defined by his response.
I find myself lying down on my bathroom floor again, staring at the underside of my sink, talking to my inner self.
It’s only two years. Two years and then we’re done.
(Why I refer to my inner self as a “we” requires a lengthy psychological profile not relevant to this particular story, but it’s often because I view my internal voice as a separate being…
I often woke up disoriented, emerging from dreams where everything was as it once was. My former spouse and I were happy again, sharing meals in our favorite restaurants or running together along the Chicago lakefront.
“What is your religion?”
Coming across with the severity of a grand inquisitor, this isn’t a question we expect from a Lyft driver, though it is a question that transports us. It takes us quickly into another scene, another story, another genre.
When a former lover asked me to describe myself, I always answered that I am simple and complex. This response, intended not to be facetious but rather to dichotomize my essence, reflects the coexistence within me of simplicity and complexity. This duality, I believe, is present in almost all socialized and experienced beings.
It has been said to me by various barroom loafers – the sort of wise but disordered, self-tortured drunks that would be at home inside Eddie Caro’s Chinchorro, the harbor dive where the therianthropic characters of Brendan Shay Basham’s Swim Home to the Vanished meet to prophesize and lament — that all of which a person has inside of them has been given by their ancestors, that despite how We strive for a different or better life, We all are meant for the track laid by those of which come before us.
I was too tired to even squeegee the shower glass door on a recent May morning. Just the day before, my husband Jon and I had set up my solo exhibit at the Ledyard Gallery on the second floor of the Howe Library in Hanover, New Hampshire. I was fatigued by the physical effort of moving art over the previous week and a half as I had also delivered paintings to a few additional locations in my home state of Vermont. The real tired came from completing the goal. The task.
My earliest memories of loving stories were when I was sitting in the light-filled corners of the kids’ stacks at the newly built Northland Public Library in the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, suburbs in the late 1970s. In 1976, my family arrived in the state after my father started a new job. Even before the library collection was moved to the new building from its humbler previous address at what was then called Three Degree Road, the older library was a quiet place of respite for all of us.
I was upstairs in the bedroom/office having just begun a writing coaching session with my last online student of the day when I heard the doorbell ring. My son’s feet met the floor with a thud and pounded their way from the living room couch to the front door…
On an island off the Breton coast in the late 18ᵗʰ century, a woman, Marianne, stands behind an easel and canvas. The camera frames Marianne at work. Most of her body is obscured, but her eyes conjure details to enhance her painting. She faces another woman—her subject, Héloïse.
I despise “isms” — racism, sexism, anti-Semitism. There are too many to count, unfortunately. I have never understood them, have never understood bigotry. But the one I guess that confuses and confounds me the most is ageism because it is the only one that touches us all — everyone ages.