J and K, the owners of the house, come out to greet us when we pull into the driveway. They live next door in another house mostly hidden by trees. J, a big man in jeans and suspenders, keeps at least ten feet from us. K hovers another ten feet or so farther back. With her straight grey bob, she doesn’t exactly remind me of my mother but she...
It’s pure fantasy of course, this American myth of self-reliance. It’s also, let’s face it, unapologetically white. Much has been made of the racism in Wilder’s books. In 2018 the American Library Association removed her name from a children’s literature award due in part to her crass portrayals of indigenous peoples and people of color. Laura’s mother’s insistence that “the only good Indian is a...
Late February/early March felt like a horror movie, the fast, almost tidy way the pandemic was unfolding and the way cable news filled an expository role. It looked like a Soderbergh split-screen concoction, like Contagion on replay from a decade ago. Until the spectacle got repetitive, the numbers got close to home, and angry people started filling my streets.
The Covid test for my son came back positive. Great, I told myself, first you gave him autism, now the plague. Dan, 32, has been unable to speak since he was three and a half, a rare case of Childhood Disintegrative Disorder. Doctors told my husband and me to expect the worst. This, they said, was as...
Today a man died in front of our building, or maybe he didn’t. It’s spring 2020 in Brooklyn, New York. Yesterday, the death count was only forty-six, the day before it was sixty-one. Up and down have replaced north and south on the compass. I opened our front door, masked and gloved, inhaling Pine Sol from the spray bottle we use on the door knob we share with other...
they maced their faces multiple times they broke
their eyeglasses tenth ride of the Mounted Units
this...
I’m definitely getting tracked and docile
But random celebrities
Reminding me I’m home
Is not my idea of soma.
Systemic response
Is kicking in amongst the primates
Creating new vectors
Of chronic frustration, chains of...
I used to complain about my long-distance relationship. I wrote heartwarming letters full of longing and “what if” speculations—once I even wrote a story titled “Empty.” That’s how I often felt after our encounters, empty. Our professions prevented us from visiting each other every weekend. Worse still: the damned job was the reason...
Malcolm X has been on my mind lately. I’ll get to that in a moment.
In my early and mid-teens, I played the clarinet, badly. I gave it up after that, and I don’t even know where my old clarinet is. But I have another one now, given to me by a friend who found it in her apartment, left behind by a previous tenant; my friend thought of me as she herself was...
Isamu Noguchi found it was easier to get himself into an internment camp than it was to get out.
Confined at home these past months due to the Coronavirus, I think often of the Japanese and Japanese Americans who were interned during World War II.
After five years of research and writing, I had recently completed a historical fiction novel based on...
Woke earlier than I’d wanted, boiled up a compress for the eyes, carried it back to bed. And because my eyes were closed, I meditated. The other day, when I was having the horrors, I got tough love from Anjelica, who said “Don’t you have a mantra? Just do it. Don’t be sentimental.” I can dole out that same cold shower when someone close calls...
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