Everything colorful was gone from the woman’s flower beds, despite all her ardent work. The summer just wouldn’t allow anything other than perennial green now. Listening to Chopin’s tender Nocturnes as dusk descended, I gazed into her yard at a wheelbarrow holding slender planks of oak she had acquired for a trellis. A large ceramic […]
Category Archives: creative nonfiction
Sunday morning at Charlie Frias
Up ahead I see a man lounging on the pavement in shorts — no shoes, no socks, no shirt. Leaning up against a utility box, he is a white man tanned browner than a band aid. His feet nearly reach the curb, so I step off my bike and wheel it gingerly past him. We […]
My story is online at Entropy magazine
My creative nonfiction story The Size of Hummingbirds was posted yesterday at Entropy magazine. There was an American robin on a bough above us guarding its nest. I had pointed it out to Rob, as well as the male grackle that had been looming higher in the tree for several days, as if setting its […]
Watching Departures
I’m laying here propped up on my pillows like a patient in a recovery ward. I’m slowly making my way thru a tube of cheddar Pringles and watching planes drift upward in the smoggy distance. They’re taking off from the airport that’s not quite a quarter-mile from where I work mandatory 45-hour weeks.
My great-grandmother lived into her late 90s
In my late great-grandmother’s building on Bathgate Avenue in the Bronx about a block from my old Catholic elementary school the stairs creaked like a rocker on the front porch they had resonance as if empty crates walked upon. A skunky amalgam of boiled cabbage and potatoes still in their dusty, cratered skins always permeated the air as I […]
The mushroom lady
The mushroom lady is afoot after a winter-long downtime. She has the air of someone who worked in retail or perhaps an administrative office in a grade school. In her Old Navy shorts and button-down shirt and her hair done like Margaret Thatcher, she prowls the grounds of the apartment complex for sprouts of fungi. Then […]
A note about perfection
I sit in the morning, tweezing my eyebrows, my coffee turning lukewarm. Over the past few days, my hairs have gathered like the poppy seeds on my toasted bagel — a small colony near the tail of my left brow, spread out like the homes of a suburb on the periphery of a city. But […]
Her ideal car color was red
In my consciousness, red is akin to Venus (aka Aphrodite), the goddess of almost anything carnal. Venus, the goddess for whom a wine festival — Vinalia Urbana — was held annually on the 23rd of April, her signature month — its linguistic origin linked to the name Aphrodite.
Money and blood
I don’t have anything against making rent payments. I just don’t like to watch — just like when I get blood drawn. I look away when the needle goes in, then turn around again as the nurse is placing a band-aid on the boo-boo.
