I got my first gerbil at age 10. They were exotic pets at the time, living primarily in the deserts of Asia. Where many school friends had hamsters, animals that are nocturnal, gerbils are daylight creatures. They are brown, fur covered, mouse-like rodents — but cuter — with long tails. When handling gerbils, you can harmlessly lift them by the base of their tail. I don’t remember from where we got him, but George came home for my birthday.
That summer I went to sleep away camp for the first time. During the month of July in 1969, I was at Camp Abelard in Upstate New York. Its predecessor was called Webatuck. A percentage of campers and staff that had been family at the abandoned grounds returned to what would now be called Abelard.…
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In the early fifties the crowded tenement district in the old mill city where I grew up was gradually thinning out as families were beginning yet another migration into newer, more prosperous communities.
My mother had died when I was three and my father and I lived with my grandmother in one such tenement. She, like most of the older people there, spoke with a thick Italian accent, and most times it was easier for her to revert to her native Italian language.
I was thirteen the year I became a Freshman in the public high school which was located in a neighborhood unfamiliar to me. I didn’t realize it at the time but on that first morning, dressed in a new outfit she had sewn for me, I took my first steps away from the only world I had ever known.…
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Death is my business, my bread and butter. So, you’d think, on my day off, I’d want to shut the door on it. But, I can’t help myself. I’m drawn to those newspaper articles. You know, those stories, hidden away amongst life’s trivia, about some poor soul who’s just been given the worst news imaginable; they’re dying. Devastating news for them and their loved ones but, newsworthy? Really?
As depressing as it is, a story about death and dying is compelling. I can’t stop myself. I read it. Diagnosed with some cruel illness which is slowly killing them, the person with the death sentence is quoted as saying, ‘I’m going to use the time I have left to make memories.’ They feel the urge to leave lingering proof that they were physically here.…
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I stood on the shore and watched as Rebecca strode across the surface of the frozen lake, carrying an ax over her shoulder. I didn’t know what she was planning to do with it. When she called and told me to meet her at the park, I thought we would talk or eat lunch in the car. When I saw her walking across the lake, I thought maybe she was planning to do some ice fishing, even though she carried no equipment and had no expertise in the sport.
After she traveled about a hundred yards across the lake, she turned around, cupped her hands over her mouth, and yelled, “Come here, Robert. I have a surprise for you.”
I was freezing and didn’t feel like moving.…
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I was two weeks recovered
when the nest first appeared,
buried in my hanging mint.
More people stopped by:
blew quick breaths and the bird
came home to nest.
First two eggs, then three,
then a sepia-splattered four
hidden deep in the twined pine.
Laid while white women cried
black wolf, an old myth breaking
through so many glass screens.
Then we forgot, fucked seriously
with mouths and I bargained
with god and I cried
after the death of G.F.
whose name isn’t mine to say.
We left for Birmingham
and worried they wouldn’t hatch
or worse – would be stolen by some
Cuckoos, smashing crystalline
brown ovum splattered
on the familiar cement patio.
When we returned, the birds were born
and the riots had begun.
– Alyssa Ross…
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Before the men came through and struck her bald, my mother said, the mountain had been verdant. Green snakes had capered in shadows beneath great green oaks, beetles had squirmed in the wet cavities of overturned rocks. My mother said that there had been whitetail deer that had drunk from streams, that there had been bears in summer and coyotes in spring and turkeys in autumn. My mother told me that this had once been a land alive.
I do not know how true her stories were.
All I know is what I see when I crest the hill, through the arch of two great tree branches that have long been stripped of their leaves and their bark.
And what I see is thus:
Sitting alone atop a hill, behind a house that has raised generations, is the bald and sandy face of a carved-out mountain top.…
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It was a bitter cold night in March 2015 when a certain sage-grouse female’s (SGF) life changed forever. That night she was designated “SGF4601” and thereafter, her movements would be closely monitored for the rest of her life. After being gently captured, she was fitted with a GPS “backpack” and released. Until her death four years later, her life was scrutinized by biologists, adding to our understanding of sage-grouse behaviors and their habitat. –Morelli, “A Year in the Life of an Idaho Sage-Grouse”
When I awoke, I was different. Or the world I lived in had changed. Or both.
Something was behind me, over me, on me. I could not see it, but I could feel it covering me so I knew it was there—something with a thin, hard-edged shape that I could not slip free of or away from, try as I might.…
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