Nonfiction

In his essay “Arendt in New York,” in our Winter 2017 issue, selected for inclusion in Best American Essays, Baron Wormser wrote “She has witnessed rant that silenced every reproof. She has waited for some larger affirmation to arise, the vision of decency, but none came.”

Monument Valley was the properly mythic place for meeting this mythic event, a solar eclipse. 

I witnessed a livestreamed genocide, 

From the brick in my hand.

It’s easy to forget that anything could happen, until something does. On November 11, 1979, a Sunday, I was working at my father’s horse farm on Vly Summit Road in Easton, New York, about ten miles south of Greenwich.

Reckoning (n): a count, computation, calculation

A day before the long drive to Northampton, where I would join friends in a book talk about war and language, I arrived at a small town emergency room, signed in, took a seat, and for the next half hour mulled over what had led me there.

I was teaching seventh-grade Humanities in New York City when the first plane hit. 

I first heard about you in a library board meeting. A homeless guy had been playing video games on the library computer. The director, a young guy with a red beard and close-set eyes, said that he made one of the employees uncomfortable.

The recent inferno at Louisiana’s Nottoway Plantation has unleashed a firestorm (no pun intended) of controversy. Memes abound on social media where Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, and ghosts of the formerly enslaved watch the fire burn in vindicated satisfaction.

Your husband and you lean over the edge, rooftop parking. Both of you panting, him holding his side. Bags from holiday shopping strewn near your feet. You watch four men meet in the center of the street below as if each of them advanced from designated corners of a boxing ring.

The intersection of Proctor, Boston, and Bridge Streets in Salem, Massachusetts is drab. A Dunkin Donuts spreads its pink and beige cheer; there’s an empty fenced-in lot with a coating of rubble, a three-family brick building, and a Walgreens, fringed with a parking lot. It’s an area no one has bothered to spruce up; the businesses will do their business regardless.

There has been no hour which I do not wish to remember.                              Margaret Gatty, The Book of Sun-Dials   “The only real objection,” said Sir Arthur Conan Doyle on the 19th of April 1909, while debating the Daylight Saving or Early

“Post-traumatic stress is the result of a fundamental reorganization of the central nervous system based on having experienced an actual threat of annihilation (or seeing somebody else being annihilated), which reorganizes self experience…and the interpretation of reality.” –Bessell van der Kolk, The Body Keeps The Score   “The more catastrophic events we’re exposed to as

I loved the first season of Survivor. We watched it, I think, when Graham was barely five. It was about the time we forced marched him along the Wissahickon Creek. Maybe we’d just moved to Philadelphia, or maybe we were in Belchertown. Anyhow, it was exciting to see people who would never choose to be

My Yale professor who taught the history of Southeast Asia described the Mekong River as one of the most fertile. The monsoon causes the river water to rise above the trees, and when it recedes, numerous fish hang from the trees along the river. When my small airplane from Bangkok flew low over the Mekong River

In the discipline of humanities, I study topics and ideas that encourage me to question things. I don’t make anything or produce a product. Are my books of poetry and translation products? If so, I don’t make any money from them. Do I produce questions? I question systems that produce work from music and artmaking.

  Rhododendron bushes frame our little family group in a series of photographs: my mother, brother, sister-in-law, their baby, my boyfriend, and me. The bushes are filled with full, lush blossoms of red and white; glossy, deep blue-green leaves form a backdrop for those constellations of blooms. Before taking photographs in front of the rhododendrons,

Friday, October 11, 1991, 11:30am Anita Hill’s voice streamed from the RCA. Dressed in what would become her iconic teal linen suit, she spoke her testimony into a microphone on a table draped with a green table skirt where she sat alone facing fourteen white men who comprised the United States Senate Judiciary Committee. Her

My father, mother, older brother, and I are spending the night on the roof. I’m four in this first memory, and we live in India, where it’s too hot to sleep inside, but out here, the air is dark and warm and soft and big, not too much of anything. And neither am I. Our

When most people hear the word antagonist, at least in the circles in which I most often find myself, they think of literature, a character written in opposition to another. A villain poised in relation to a protagonist. Macbeth and Macduff. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Mrs. Danvers and Rebecca. But I have an easier

What was I thinking back then? That my professors wouldn’t take attendance, that I was finally away from home and I had time – plenty of time – and that people would never actually notice I wasn’t ever where I was supposed to be, or would fail to see that I was driving Peter’s orange

Everyone who has ever left New York signs their presence with a trace. The trace is the signature of what escapes when you absent yourself, when you’ve ghosted the city but marked your X in all the old familiar places which will now dream your dreams, disrupt your presence, and haunt your comings and goings

I don’t know his name, or what crime he was accused of, or whether he was guilty. We’re told that he composed a poem moments before the executioner’s blade fell. This suggests such remarkable equanimity that I find myself wondering if the sparse details I have about this event are reliably rooted in what happened.

[1] In other words i. Dirt isn’t all that ancient. They say this planet is almost five billion years old. Its rotation has changed over time. Its revolution, too. The way time has come to be, the way it has evolved, seconds have           shortened, s   t   r   e   t   c   h   e   d,        

Say I begin with midsummer. July with the humidity thicker than a slice of wedding cake, and everyone acting less sane because of it. The chatter of crows loitering on powerlines that sag above the asphalt. The annoyance of a world ashamed of its own hubris. How I keep trying to be poetic, but then,

Israel was supposed to save us. All of my grandparents, I knew, had fled to the US from Poland/Russia/Ukraine/Belarus—wherever, the borders were always changing—to escape pogroms, conscription, and the impossibility of making a living. The impossibility of living. My grandfather’s mother, in Ukraine, died of hunger during the Stalinist famine—this I only surmised as an

My father and I struggled to have conversations that didn’t involve silence and awkwardness. I held contempt for him abandoning me when I was a kid, for being absent most of my life. I don’t know my father very well. At fifty years old, I presume I never will. Immense pain was buried in my

In the shelved episode “Lucy Tells the Truth,” Lucy was supposed to encourage Ricky to fudge his tax return. In the script, Ricky was going to refuse to cheat. In reality, Desi Arnaz wouldn’t entertain committing the scene to film. He was Cuban Pete, king of the rhumba beat and all, but he insisted on

My son is born in the morning in early September as blue-black shadows recede, gently pushed aside by the burgeoning dawn streaming through the windows of our tiny studio apartment on 7th street. That morning I step into the world a New Man and I ride my racing-red single speed with its carefree drop handles

On April 20th, twenty-five years ago, I underwent a midterm abortion in New York. The choice was not mine. I had just returned from serving as a Peace Corps Volunteer in the Republic of Niger, West Africa. Those three sentences have taken several decades to write. Trauma is like that. It never actually leaves the

This is not my mother’s eulogy. She’s not dead. In fact, today she tells me (in a very lively voice) to put the two on the three. She tells me this four times before I tell her that I can’t because both the two and the three are red. “They are?” she asks, leaning forward

This piece is part of our Winter 2023 print issue, available for purchase here.          

This piece is part of our Winter 2023 print issue, available for purchase here.          

This piece is part of our Winter 2023 print issue, available for purchase here.          

This piece is part of our Winter 2023 print issue, available for purchase here.          

This piece is part of our Winter 2023 print issue, available for purchase here.

This piece is part of our Winter 2023 print issue, available for purchase here.

This piece is part of our Winter 2023 print issue, available for purchase here.          

How long have I in bondage lain,
And languished to be free!
Alas! and must I still complain–
Deprived of liberty.

  On the afternoon I come home from surgery, I converse with a giant snake. * On an evening six years before surgery, I am teaching a poorly-attended church group about Jungian theology. The wounded healer. Chiron the centaur. How to lie in the cave of Asklepius, on the couch from which clinic gets its

  The sharp staccato of Cantonese swirled around Ming’s Restaurant as twelve of us sat, shoulders almost touching, at a round banquet table. Steam billowed from the swinging kitchen doors, wafting a seductive scent of steamed buns and ginger. For a moment I was a child again, going to yum cha with my parents after

  I’m lying on my back, scrawny feet up in the stirrups. In my head, I go like, don’t look, don’t look, don’t you look at her, but of course, I do. I raise my head, and there next to the gynecologist is Mom, peering into my most private me. Mom cranes her neck over

I.   Because you are only 5 feet 1.5 inches tall, and your limbs only stretch so far. You often speed-walk to keep pace with anyone over 6 feet.   Because your family tells you that you didn’t drink enough milk while you were growing up.   Because you hate the taste of it. As

Mike Hippler wanted to be remembered. That’s what he told me, through the pages of his journal, approximately 31 years after he died from AIDS on April 4, 1991. When I arrived at the GLBT Historical Society, in the basement of a beautiful building on a seedy street in San Francisco, I knew that I

Rain splattered against our bedroom window on a chilly spring weekend morning. I burrowed deeper under the thick cotton comforter, tightened my arms around my husband’s trim waist, and rubbed the lingering wetness of tears on my cheekbones off on his soft sleep T-shirt. That morning, I didn’t want to be comforted or to comfort.

When I pick up my 9-year-old daughter from school, the first thing she does, as soon as she clambers up onto the backseat and dumps her heavy backpack aside, is to squeeze her petit torso between the two front seats and, like a trained parakeet, bend her head to offer me my bribe, a kiss

Water Richard Halliburton (1900–1939) In February of 1995, when I was four-and-a-half years old, my mother had a nightmare. In her dream, she was at Rockaway Beach with her mother and me – three generations – and I waddled through the sand toward the waves. When she reminisces, my mother mentions the weather first, how

Cri de Coeur Some years ago, in a workshop on whiteness I was leading, a delegation from the local Friends’ Meeting was among the participants. One of them was a very elderly woman, so disabled she was nearly bent double and moved slowly, with great difficulty. I’m saying she had every excuse to stay home.

1 I think of letters as faces. 2 You want that E to look like it’s uppercutting somebody. 3 Back in the day in Chicago, gangs used to have gang cards—almost like a business card—and there were all sorts of dope logos and images and especially lettering. 4 By the way a person writes, you

Last summer I climbed an English hill my seven-year-old son said I shouldn’t. On a family road-trip across the United Kingdom, while walking around a sparkling, oval tarn in the verdant Lake District, we reached a fork. So far, we had strolled past giant oaks and leafy copses, quaint fences, and mellow glades—a pleasant enough

Ghosts Years ago, I found a picture of my mother and father with their first-born son. Tommy is perhaps two years old, balanced on my father’s knee. All three look straight at the camera and smile, dressed in their fifty’s finery. They appear to be in a photography studio, posing for a family portrait. But

As Long As I Know You: The Mom Book by Anne-Marie Oomen We will all experience mother loss. Yet, our mothers are also eternally with us, their formative presences lodging in our beings in ways that run the gamut from interstitial balm to sharp-edged irritant.  How we lose our mothers is shaped by a larger

Writing While Parenting Ben Berman Able Muse Press ISBN: 978-1-77349-111-0 One might think a book titled Writing While Parenting would be filled with tips about time- and stress management, about how to straddle the competing demands of parenthood and authorship, but the brief, incisive, funny, profound, and memorable essays in Ben Berman’s book offer us

The Beloved Republic Steven Harvey Wandering Aengus Press, 2023 “The beech tree rising in our bow window finds its own shape without any help from me.” So begins “A Whole Life” Steven Harvey’s preface that, like the taproot of the tree, anchors the collection of essays in The Beloved Republic. Written over a quarter of

This piece is part of our Winter 2022 print issue, available for purchase here.

This piece is part of our Winter 2022 print issue, available for purchase here.

This piece is part of our Winter 2022 print issue, available for purchase here.

This piece is part of our Winter 2022 print issue, available for purchase here.

This piece is part of our Winter 2022 print issue, available for purchase here.

This piece is part of our Winter 2022 print issue, available for purchase here.

This piece is part of our Winter 2022 print issue, available for purchase here.

This piece is part of our Winter 2022 print issue, available for purchase here.

You held my eyes from the back of Advanced Studies of Dramatic Literature as if you were a tousled debauchee from an unrated foreign film, the kind with a sophisticated plot line, sure, but also plenty of straps, leather, and velvet. Years after our son’s autism diagnosis and days after your own, we sit at

It’s morning and I am about to open the refrigerator when I see my mother squatting on the floor, shaking a thin line of white powder along the baseboards. Her face is furrowed in concentration, her forehead slicked with sweat. I’m ten, it’s the first day of summer vacation, 1967, and a long stretch of

We sit in a line on a bench in Washington Square Park, my first son, me, my second son. Suitcases flank us—two of us are headed to the train station and on back home. One of us will stay here in the city of his birth. I can’t hear their voices because what I’m thinking

A former public-school teacher, she was fluent in multiple languages and said she had a graduate degree. Born into the post-war prosperity of the 1950s, she was raised in an upscale San Francisco neighborhood, three generations of her family in the same single-family Edwardian, recently valued at up to four-million dollars. Her father had been

The first day I ever heard the name Cody Lee Moffitt was in late January. I’d just finished a lunch of peanut butter and crackers when my phone beeped. A friend, Ray Kearns, had posted a note on our church’s message board. There’s a man on the loose who wrecked on Gopher Lane. Drug deal

1. My father was twelve when he learned that his mother had kept a part of herself hidden. Five of them were standing at a Customs desk at Orly airport in Paris in 1957: my father, his older brother, his younger sister, their parents. The Customs officer held the family’s passports like a royal flush,

  “It’s more than just a rock to us, it’s a stepping stone to a better future.” –John Trudell as told to a reporter after the takeover of Alcatraz Island                   They kicked in the doors at the crack of dawn. It was the first direct action by the Milwaukee American Indian Movement (AIM)

  1. I never knew his name. When I picture him now, I see a man somewhere between my age—I’m fifty-nine—and ten or fifteen years younger. I don’t think of myself as old, but I think of him as “the old man in my building,” because that’s what he looked like to my twelve-year-old eyes.

  There is a farm in the heart of the Green Mountains that sits by a winding road near a bend in the river, its two-hundred-year-old brick house lording over the valley, a backdrop of forested mountains behind it. It is nestled in the landscape, as a New England farm is supposed to be. A

May 27, 2020 Today, we dig. Bees circle our heads and our hands, inspecting our movements in the grass, their grass. Ella, my fairy-like child, wants to plant a whole field of sunflowers on our front lawn. We have purchased a single pack of seeds. Perhaps it is too late in the season to plant

“Oh, wow,” says my husband. “I blacked out.” He and I are sprawled on our bed; we’ve just had sex, and I’ve got my arm around him. “You dozed off,” I say. “Both of us did.” It’s the Monday after Pandemic Thanksgiving, a gray day in upstate New York. A kitty circles the bed, the

Author’s Note: All quotes are from the Modern Library College Edition published in 1981 and originally published in 1856 under the title, History of Plymouth Plantation. My title comes from a poem by Richard Michelson that is the title of his book published in 2015 by the University of Pittsburgh Press. As a résumé of

I came to the Brooklyn Museum to see Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party but it was the work of Judith Scott that stopped me in my tracks. I do not like sculpture much, I do not know how to feel about it. My mother had died three years before and I was thinking of her when

I was initially surprised when the Solidarity Book Project, which is a social justice initiative of Amherst College, Massachusetts, invited me, a Trinidadian writer, to contribute to a communal monument to solidarity. However, when I read the Project’s espoused aim of pushing against legacies of anti-Black racism and settler colonialism, I had to concede the

In 2014, my parents announced they were leaving Massachusetts and retiring to California. I marched into my therapist’s office and flung myself onto the couch to cry. I couldn’t believe they were abandoning me. Worst of all, I told my therapist, was that now I was going to have to be an adult and buy

I am a Christian minister who once spent the night with a sex worker named Adam. Although, to be technical about it, I was a first-year seminarian – not yet a card-carrying minister – when I spent the night with this sex worker. And since we’re being technical, I didn’t actually spend the night with

We didn’t arrange for a week of travel in the south of Wales in order to trail in some literary wake of Dylan Thomas. Anna wanted to relive some of her travels during her university days at Cambridge, and she thought I would be thrilled with the opportunity to hike through rugged greening landscapes. But

  When you turn the corner And you run into yourself Then you know that you have turned All the corners that are left Langston Hughes     The more I stared at the drawing, the more alien and unrecognizable it became. I had labored over every line, but it was not the person I