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 […]
Category Archives: creative nonfiction
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.
Problem priorites
I am in a chatty mood today, so I will discuss while at the same time trying to entertain. It is not beneath me to steal napkins from the Whole Foods cafe area because my house is in need of them and I don’t want to bother with buying them after I finish my lunch […]
Booth by the door
It was only later that I found out that the restaurant had a back room where all the good stuff happened.
