I finish book drafts,
a dedication, footer-pagination.
I tuck and roll
a few final arrangements
neatly justified. Suburban life
similar in its style
manuals stream-lining formal
editing and copy. Writing
a respite with current
change in the air.
Shrinking margins offer burial
and discounts on ritual
exorcism. I frequently overuse
words – blood, song, “light” –
sometimes cradles the unborn
fragments of memory dimmed …
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Dear Mr. Emperor,
Sorry to bug you with a
letter, but I couldn’t find a suggestion box at your original 32nd Ave location, and I didn’t
want to trouble your devoted employees, who were busy offering samples, filling
waffle cones, and making change. Not that you need any help from us peons: you’re
the Emperor of Ice Cream!
And I’m your No. 1 Fan.
Seriously. I was there at Ground Zero during the soft opening, followed by the
grand opening, then two or three times a week, more often six or seven, for the
past however many glorious years. My doctor has some concerns about my diet
owing to my weight and cholesterol levels, but only because he’s a worrywart
who’s never tasted two scoops of your Almond Brittle with Salted Ganache in a
sugar cone.…
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These bitches didn’t even know I was ready.
“Just give me a reason to defend myself.”
I repeated this as a mantra in the parking lot
of the Lauderdale Lakes Point Café.
We were at the breaking point. Another week.
Another battle.
I took a moment to consider my triggers. There
was Ray. There was me being pregnant. There was obviously my mother. Which.
I wasn’t going to do it.
I wasn’t going to do it this time.
I wasn’t even going to bring up my mother.
I was the only one who ever brought up my
mother.
Bringing up my mother was entirely in my
control.
Even though, of course, as usual, she was
driving me crazy.
But I wasn’t going to do it.…
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Why do I cry?
I saw a jewel.
No heart, no bones
and nerveless in
the pink postcoital light—
I am nowhere near done,
so you say
imagine an animal—
and I am taken
to the white core of
the Cambrian explosion,
bend in the heat and
emerge with an apple—
and we have bobbed in the tropics,
bobbed in the icy polar seas
and mindlessly scoured the floor—
stingers drawn
head and tail aglow with
Jamaica Farewell,
you catch a swell.
– Josh Lipson…
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For
me, non-fiction has to meet a lot of requirements in order to be classified as
a good read. I’m a curious person. Even a nosy one. I want to eavesdrop on the
writer’s experiences and secret thoughts. I want to know what happened to them.
I want to understand how they felt. And, most of all, I hope to discover
profundity, some kind of wisdom about what it means to be alive. It’s a tall
order, but I’ve found a book that fills it.
Relief
by Execution: A Visit to Maunthausen by Gint Aras (Finding the Moon in Sugar,
The Fugue) is one of the best
non-fiction books I’ve read in a long time. Lyrical and gripping while sparkling with wisdom, Aras leads his reader
through darkness and despair to epiphany as he ruminates on his experiences of
abuse, racism, ethnic identity, and the long-term effects of generational
trauma.…
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There’s
a scene in Marya Hornbacher’s Wasted: A
Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia where she describes reading philosophy in
all-night cafes, drinking black coffee after black coffee, while debating the materialist
ontology.
This,
I remembered thinking the moment I read the scene. This is what it is like to have anorexia. Forget the magazine
obsessive, model-thin striving stereotype that I had seen again and again and
again. This was the ‘real’ anorexic–not a hunger for beauty or thinness, but a
hunger for knowledge and nothing but. As Hornbacher states in several places in
the memoir, being bulimic was something bodily, corporeal–while anorexia was
ethereal, saint-like. To be an anorectic was to be knowledge incarnate.
The
first time I read Marya Hornbacher’s memoir, I was twenty.…
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