Personal Essays

Appearing in Dorothy Parker’s Ashes

It’s Father’s Day. My father descends his apartment’s basement stairs to do laundry. He bangs his calf. He doesn’t remember doing it. Somehow, even though he is on blood thinners, a blood clot forms. Also, because he is on blood thinners, he bleeds internally within the leg, but the blood has nowhere to go. It’s trapped by the fasciae puts pressure on the nerves and the muscles. The pain is intense, radiating down to his foot, up to his thigh. He cannot walk. He cannot bear any weight. The ambulance comes, and paramedics carry him down the steep stairs of his apartment. After twelve hours, he undergoes an emergency fasciotomy, in which a surgeon cuts through the tough white membranes, lets out the blood, saves his leg.

September 2023

PUSHCART PRIZE NOMINATED

Winner of the Writer’s Award for Prose, Nassau Review

I find a note in my father’s things as I help him sort items before a move. It is from my mother, dated March 13, 1979, eight months before she died. I do not know why he kept it, but I am grateful he did…

This note brings me back to my childhood, where I am sometimes a parenthetical aside, as I am in my mother’s letter. But it also confirms for me something I have sometimes questioned: it was real. It really happened. It really was like that. Sometimes I scoff at myself, say, it wasn’t that bad. Sometimes I wonder: am I making some of this up? After all, how many times have I been told that what I think is going on is not going on? How many times have I heard that the whisky is tea? Or that my mother is sleeping, not passed out? With enough training, it becomes easy to convince myself that I can’t trust my own experience. Besides, who wants to admit that it really is that bad?

May 2023

Still Point Arts Quarterly

My mother died six months after her fiftieth birthday, having drunk herself to death. It was not pretty or peaceful.

I am about to turn fifty, and I feel the pendulous drop of time’s weight.

Something last March compelled me to the bookshelf. What I wanted was a guide, someone to help me make the transition between a life before and a life after this milestone that seems so threatening, so determinative, someone to help me navigate the waves and troughs of middle age.

September 2022 (first piece in issue).

I don’t know why you’re here.

I’m here because bees are fighting in two of my right fingers and a wasp lives at the base of my thumb. The center of my palm is a swamp fed by an acid spring. Two jackals track the length of my forearm. Lightning strikes the broad plain of my back, the air dry and electric. Each morning the nest of rattlesnakes at the base of my skull rouses, the tsk tsk tsk of their tails tightening my scalp, my neck, making it hard to think, to move.

The first thing I see when I walk into the hotel bathroom is a scale in front of a floor-to-ceiling mirror. You look good, the scale tells me.

This bathroom is designed to force one to look at oneself, and specifically to look at oneself naked. In addition to the floor-to-ceiling mirror, another spans the entire wall above the sink. The shower is encased in clear glass. It’s all very high-end spa, and all very vulnerability-inducing.