Adults were giants when I was growing up in the 1950s. My parents were gods, powerfully stomping into the village of my childhood. Their forbearing “fe-fi-fo-fum” lauded over my brothers and sister and kept me in a perpetual state of intimidating awe. My mother and father hoarded information like misers garner gold. If I asked either one how old they were the answer was “over 21” or “old enough to vote.” They usually responded to questions with “go look it up.” If it wasn’t in Funk and Wagnall’s encyclopedia, I was out of luck. Why wouldn’t they just tell me?
Standing on one of the elliptical machines at Gleason’s Boxing Gym in Brooklyn, my eyes followed my 28-year-old daughter Jillian. It was the first night of the qualifying fights for the Golden Gloves in 2016 and the gym was packed.…
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God-With-Us had come to Churchland and, since he was trending wildly across social media, many pastors were inviting him to speak in their sanctuaries and convention centers. They praised him for his authenticity and his wokeness, but they also kept a careful eye on him.
One morning, God-With-Us was ministering in a poor neighborhood when he came upon a line of invalids that stretched for blocks. Every year, a prominent doctor came down to host a one-day clinic for the economically disadvantaged. However many people he could see before sunset would receive professional medical care at no cost, no matter how deficient their health or health coverage.
God-With-Us saw a man who had been in a wheelchair for thirty-eight years and asked, “Do you want to be healed?”…
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In the Smoky Mountains, Tennessee
The license plates line up
in the gravel parking lot of Clingman’s Dome.
The fathers step out, groan, and unfold.
The children crack the road-trip hull
and their mothers do not scold.
The blue fog
of the Smoky Mountains brings them here.
A Cherokee curiosity,
the Shaconage. That sky-colored smoke
is sacred to the dead. The tourists tromp
to sunrise, and disappear—
and now it’s night.
The locusts boil under my feet.
They feed on chalky deer minds, skulls beneath
more skulls, from a thousand hunts
once holy. The topsoil turns
in the larvae-heating roil.…
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My mom died two years ago. It was a long, excruciating process that ended up with her being in the ICU for a month on a ventilator, slowly drowning to death in lungs that were too withered and tired to carry on. The whole experience was God-awful traumatic: heartbreaking, agonizing, ghoulish.
After two years I have found that grief doesn’t recede, it just got molded into my life like a fitted sheet. I sometimes take it for granted, but I have to take it out once in a while, give it a shake and wash it. I can go for days without thinking about it, but it’s always there. I’ll always have it in my life, and it will always be king-sized.
I have three triggers.…
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It was universally acknowledged, amongst their friends and family, that Sophia and Drew were one of the world’s more elusive creatures; a perfectly happy couple.
Married for three years, second marriages both, they had skipped past the brutal stages of life. It wasn’t that they hadn’t done the hard yards, Sophia was careful to explain to those interested, it was that they hadn’t had to do them together. Drew had never borne witness to the appalling moment when Sophia had slapped the beetroot red face of her squalling newborn. Sophia had never been abandoned to cope with three children under three by a younger Drew off on a dirtbike weekend. It was by tacit agreement that they shared these snippets of their former lives; God knows the guilt I feel, but I was pushed to the limit, and Jeez I was selfish, I can see that now, but only so they could hold them up as mirrors to the new, untarnished people they now were to each other.…
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In the room, they talked – just the two of them – in total darkness, harrowing through the losses, the hurts, the threats.
The room – thick, black walls, cement floor – came with the house. Its usage shifted over the years, from bomb shelter to darkroom to wine cellar. They left it empty when they first moved in. But one night, standing in the room, deciding how it could be used – maybe laundry, maybe storage – they began to speak in the dark – about memories and dreams, shards of images arising from within. She told him her nightmare of a horse on fire. He told her of a cockroach he’d once found on his pillow that crawled into his sleep, night after night.…
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The streets were empty, eerie even. No children played in their yards, no laughter filled the air, nothing. Things are not like they used to be. But as I roll down the road, bass bumping and the volume on high, the neighborhood fades away and I find myself elsewhere.
I’m still in my car, but the outside world has all but disappeared, drowned out by the noise of my past. I clutch the steering wheel as memories flicker by like frames on a film reel, unable to comprehend the blur of years past. Deep breaths. Count to ten. My hand instinctively reaches for the radio, nothing a little music won’t cure.
Country. A twangy guitar comes over the stereo, accompanied by a sad story sung by a hurt man.…
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