The fearless woman who helped demolish my garage cabinets was crouched on my staircase, painting the walls when I asked if her partner, a...

This essay was written while my daughter was still in Nepal: When my boyfriend first hurled the slice of cooked Italian sausage off our second-floor balcony, it landed on the garage, looking red and robust, but the circling vultures never even sniffed at it. Over time, the meat turned into a blackened, shriveled relic. It reminded me of my daughter’s long-gone belly-button stub – the fragment of her umbilical cord that came home from the hospital with us, eventually dropped o

Months before the brutal police killing of George Floyd, before the protests when I made a sign saying, “I Can’t Breathe” and "Stop the Killing"—before the global pandemic, I longed to see a live mermaid show. When the doorman at Florida’s Weeki Wachee Springs said, “Sorry, no more seats,” crying would have been absurd at my age, then nearly 60, but I came close. My eyes filled. My chest felt weighted by a thousand childhood sorrows, never resolved. My then-partner tried sl

Editor’s Note: I wrote this travelogue-style essay in November 2018, while visiting my daughter Caroline during her service with Peace...

My goal, in this nonfiction essay, was to provide a first-hand report on what Russ Douthat described in The New York Times as the 1970s...

“You need to find her gun and hide it,” my sister mumbled while our mother, propped in a hospital bed, prattled on about finding Bigfoot....

Based on my partner’s encounter with U.S. Customs officials at Dulles airport, this essay is a romantic exploration of the discrimination...

At her neck’s nape, the red splotch still lurks, a sunny chick’s fuzz covers the scar of snarling angels, roaring, refusing her newborn...