I couldn’t afford the way memory ransacked my heart and left an airless cell pushing against my windpipe and the corners of my eyes.
So my memories turned to cold water, rushing in through the gash the iceberg left. An iceberg—there’s a devil. How wicked to hide, a towering city of thoughtless cold beneath the water’s surface–invisible and unknowable.
It is eight years since Carole left and we have to find her. First we have to get back to our home in Germany, but what a mess we go through. We must get across the Polish Corridor and then still so far, with everything miserable and broken. People die on the platform just waiting for the train;
In unconnected hours face-to-face, drenched in the ice-water of failed intimacy, alone finally becomes loneliness. My strong right-side withered under worm-eaten embraces, preoccupied hearts, and habitual sex.
She screams out ”Won’t someone please shoot this dog? Please, if I circle back around the block one more time, will you please have your gun ready and try to shoot the dog? Shoot the damn dog and don’t shoot me? Please.”
Sometimes they weigh me down, the promises duty binds upon me and the gifts I can never repay. Those days, I am haunted by history, especially the dreams stolen from young dreamers.
She could close every comment, every argument. Last words were her specialty: last words and stage whispers. She could keep a list a mile long. She could drink scotch and laugh with the men. And with the Bitch, I was funny and glib. With her, I had a context, a ‘tude, a style. With the Bitch boa wrapped around my shoulders, nothing could hurt me. My stride was, sexy, witty, and impermeable.
You can teach an old car new tricks. When I moved to Portland, I bought my first car: a perfect green Rambler Rogue. I paid $1000 for a car that ran almost perfectly for years and worried that I likely overpaid. I spoiled her faded, matronly body, by plunging it into a small yellow truck [...]
Today is 350 day. Where? All over the world there are creative actions. Find one near you and participate. 350 what? If atmospheric concentrations of CO2 remain above 350 parts per million, we face human and natural disaster. who? You, me, all of us. Why? In December in Copenhagen the world’s nations meet to agree [...]
I traveled thousands of miles to stand here in the snow and the cold where my Grandmother and her younger daughter, Eva, found one another in 1944, after eighteen months of heartbreaking separation, amongst thousands of women penned by barbed wire into two groups, awaiting role call.
I’m done with my family. I don’t mean to be cruel, mind you. I just need to be free for a bit. I’ve earned it. They’ve been taking up an extraordinary amount of my bandwidth, what with the usual proving myself good and worthy, writing and performing pieces of them, and feeling haunted by the [...]