Your sister, the Dog Star, was the brightest. You, the Pup, nobody even saw, until one night in eighteen sixty-two, when a young man with a telescope of his own devise looked up, and there, where the wobble in your sister’s gait suggested you...
Hi, This Is Your Neighbor
Attention Volunteers: Due to ____________, we have updated the Get Out the Vote script as follows. Further changes will be uploaded to this site weekly daily hourly on the minute. Please note, we have discontinued secondary primary log...
Behind the Red Railing: My Childhood Isolation
My first experience of isolation and social distancing occurred when I was four years old. Although I understand it now through the eyes of an adult, my recollection of the episode is utterly clear. I often picture it in my mind as a time before...
Two Poems By José Edmundo Ocampo Reyes
Collateralized Debt Obligations Structured by Cows We rate every deal. It could be structured by cows and we would rate it. —unnamed Standard and Poor’s official It could be structured by cows and we would rate it, this bundle of regurgitated debt...
Coping on the Upper West Side
The building is filled with old ladies, some with walkers, some with aides, and many who manage quite well on their own. They are mostly widows, wearing sensible shoes from Harry’s, lots of black puffer coats, and carrying New Yorker shopping bags...
DOWN ALTERNATIVE
Fact death’s birth theater: a circling thicket of negligent capability’s white folding chairs on a plantation or at an inauguration. Effluvium whiteness Mount Vesuviusing to thy neighbor’s lawn— an abscess. And I’m swaddled in white, stained...
Cradling Our Breath
Cradling Our Breath Afloat Rocking the Heart Safe Harbour In June, I sat with a guided meditation teacher on Dan Harris’s app, Ten Percent Happier, where the prompt was simply, “cradle your breath.” As I applied the...
Strange Times
The Last Time Things Were Normal The last time things were more or less normal, I got a haircut. Or rather, a trim. There was no particular reason for it. I woke up, noticed the dullness of the dark, wiry strands wrapped in a bun, felt the...
April 7, 2020
They’re dressing up cats on Facebook and someone has taught a dog to play volleyball— a natural, he always makes the return. Bocelli and Orlenski transcend and console, nepenthe for the quarantined. I hold onto a kitchen chair and learn to plié. The...
I Am My Mother’s Mother
Happy hour in the memory care unit means Frank Sinatra on the stereo, kiwi smoothies in little plastic cups, and my mom, wearing elasticized pants and my dad’s old zip-up sweater, dancing among wheelchairs. This late-January snapshot of my mom’s...
When Home Is More Than a House: Learning from Trees and Time
“…to become native of this place, if we are to survive here, and our neighbors too, our work is to learn to speak the grammar of animacy, so that we might be truly at home.” –Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass So many processes...
Yelp Reviews For a Lost Corner
Como Pizza 4035 Broadway ★★★★★ $ · Pizza A hot hot slice, a treat, the epitome of NYC, an orange bubble of oil shimmering on the surface of cratered cheese. A premature bite...