Cookies for Breakfast
I have learned life is short, and dying takes forever. For nearly seventy years, I’ve been a whirling dervish. I ran to and from various aspects of a life filled with perpetual…
Stories Poems Essays
Hank
I am offended. It is not my fault that there is no bedroom door to close to keep the drywall sanding-dust out. No, not my fault, and to tell the truth…
Integrative Ancestors, redux
When my daughter Sela was three, she invented a story about Bob Marley and Frederick Douglass. I put her allegory in the “Afterthoughts” of…
Target Practice
My mother saw the raccoon first. She was chopping veggies in front of an open window, hoping for a breeze because it was August, and already hot and sticky…
Shanghai Dumplings
I sat alone at the Shanghai Dumpling King on 34th Avenue in the same seat she always sat in. I came on a Thursday afternoon the way she always did…
Moshe
I am six years old and I go to Yeshiva and my name is Moshe. In summer there is an old woman who lives in the radiator in the living room of my apartment.
We grew up on fear and became heroes…
Fifty feet of nylon line and a milk jug stretched across the bay. Twenty hooks, mostly trebles, hung waiting; chicken liver and dough balls luring them in.
A Drop Like Wet Shellac
To your villa they come– the sketchbooks, the cameras, parade past your clay mugs and plates, black lace mantillas that covered your legs, white wooden bed…
Recipe for Saying Goodbye
Prepare for cooking by crawling in bed with ill mother to hear the secrets of making her special cornbread. Talk about all the times you have shared her cornbread…