Within the industrial design world, Eva Zeisel is a legend, but I had no idea when I began working for her. It was 2000, I was 24, and had recently moved to Manhattan. I responded to an ad in the Village Voice that promised $12 an hour for an administrative assistant to a designer. The next day, I took the number 1 train to 116th & Broadway and entered her large, cluttered apartment for an interview. Immediately inside were floor-to-ceiling overstuffed bookcases. “Come in dah-ling,” I followed the voice through a maze of tables dotted with lamps, vases, and bowls (which I’d learn were all her own designs) to find an ancient-looking woman. With fluffy white hair and cloudy eyes, Eva sat in a pink and gold wingback chair.…
Flip a skirt hem and you have a lip to cradle tomatoes or questions or a bit of weather, make-do wings for the wrangling of life’s loose change, which is to say I lied about calling a truce. Enough with locks and keys. We each need more pockets to hide those broken parts of ourselves to be shared only under a moonless sky. What I bared and what I bore were twice the dare I could afford. With you my knees were forever hinged in remorse and ecstasy. Water flows down the easiest path. Icarus could have fashioned himself a raft, but who lunges for the sun dreaming of caution? You could call me abandoned or merely shipwrecked on a fickle shore. Here I am gilding my store of feathers, courting lost oarsmen and begging for a storm.…
I was looking at my father’s bookshelves when I noticed things other than books. My father had put ceramics in the empty spaces. There were some vases and bowls, but among the ordinary objects were two figures. They were made from red clay, maybe terra-cotta, and their surfaces were rough—each stood about a foot-and-a-half tall. They were wearing robes, so their arms and legs were hidden by folds of “cloth.” Their faces were simplified, yet suggested nobility. Each was wearing a crown: They were a king and queen.
It wasn’t clear if they were a specific king and queen, or whether they were generic. But I soon realized they were chess pieces. I didn’t see a giant chessboard or any other oversized pieces to match. Maybe my father hadn’t planned for these objects to be used in an actual game of chess.…
My reticent leanings began at a young age. I was about eight years old when my younger sister died from leukemia. Life for us before that was idyllic. Our father worked for a multinational oil company and we’d lived abroad starting soon after I was born, with all the benefits bestowed upon expatriates. My sister, Gail, was born in Jamacia, which for us in the 1950s was a paradise, very safe and very British. Gail’s cancer put an end to all of that. We returned to the United States.
Gail’s death was my fault, as far as I knew. I’d failed to do what a big brother was supposed to do: keep her safe. Sixty years later, I’ve not convinced myself that isn’t true. And I don’t expect I ever will.…
The moving truck is angled backwards in the driveway, and the “For Sale” sign sways a few feet from the blood red X someone spray-painted in our yard. Our house is hollowed out, its insides packed thick and sloppy in the truck. The love seat is inverted on the sofa, and the kitchen table stands flush against the side. Bags of clothes, lampshades, and boxes of toys are seated in stacked chairs. There’s bed mattresses and chipped picture frames. Old books and older bookshelves. Porcelain whatnots wrapped in a month’s worth of sports section.
The wind blows the sign over and I set it back up. Drive it six inches in the ground and look at the large X.
I step inside. What’s left of the boxes, mostly dishes and photo albums, are scattered around the living room floor. …
You disappeared quicker than I could watch. Who would have thought gravity faster than light, fire from the stars we know already two hundred and fifty years behind, not able to compete with the satellites passing above the place where we lay on the equatorial line, staring at the heavens. All through the night they traced our sleeping as if following a magnet, orbits slowly degrading, a limited number of concentric circles, while they signaled, mapped, tracked, escaping atmosphere to briefly return, disintegrating.
Author’s Note: This poem is about a disintegrating romantic relationship. We went to Chang Mai in 1990 and trekked up near the Burmese border to a village where were to get on a bamboo raft and paddle back towards Chang Mai. …
A memory of my father: we are on the train together—the subway that goes above ground, the subway that goes below ground, and we are on our way. On our way to so many places.
A memory of my father: the train stops at a station and my father stands up. I stand up with him, but he tells me to sit down. “Don’t get up,” he says. “I’m just going to check the map.” He holds onto the doorway and lurches outside; his body is out of the train car, getting as close to the map on the platform as possible. It looks like he is about to let go and jump out onto the platform, and I imagine the train doors closing with me in it and him outside of it, and I become afraid and rush to his side.…
