It’s not that I don’t trust motherfuckers, I just didn’t trust him. Something I heard somewhere, sometime, about never eating at a place called Mom’s or playing poker with a dealer named Doc. But he didn’t cheat me out of money playing stud, he cheated with my girl. I don’t know any sayings about shit like that, but that’s neither here nor there. I had plans to leave her anyway. Smelled soaps of others on her soft skin. I’m not one to stand alone in the chapel, a crown of thorns on my head. Makes no sense. Besides, it’s not like I can call the Righteous Love Police. And now, she’s rides in a BMW—I think he’s a fucking dentist or doctor of letters—and I watch sunsets with a dog named Blue and a bottle of Johnny Red.…
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I distinctly told her that I didn’t want tomato on my hot
pastrami and cheese sandwich, but sure enough when
I got home and took the sandwich out of the wrapper,
I saw that on both halves there was tomato pressed against
the cheese, which made me say out loud, “Damn it. . .
I made it clear that I didn’t want tomato in my sandwich.
That I don’t like tomato in my sandwiches!”
Deciding not to take it back—mainly out of hunger—
I pulled out the tomato, which had done a fine job
permeating the cheese in both halves.
I then started eating while looking at the tomato lying there
on the paper, wondering why they even put tomato in sandwiches
or anywhere else for that matter.…
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“You will be famous,” is the first thing I remember my mother telling me. I had no idea how true that was. I walt through school my shoes squeaking on the floor, a bodyguard on my right, I had no idea what it meant, I just thought he was my friend. Other children couldn’t come near me, I stayed inside and watched them run, even the teacher had left the room. An unfamiliar feeling curled in my gut; I would later recognise it as loneliness. I pushed it away I didn’t know it then but I would be doing that often.
The next few years passed in much the same manner; I think I was about ten when I realised what all this meant. I was in history class, I was related to everyone we learnt about, from presidents of old to Hollywood movie stars, they were all family.…
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When the gods want to punish us, they answer our prayers.
Oscar Wilde
The Senior Center science class softened my recent widowhood—we read ScienceNews, a weekly magazine filled with mid-level science sophistication. The class offered me structure and companionship.
The medical section was placed after the astronomy update that explained the expanding universe and the ripples in spacetime caused by colliding black holes. We often skipped the ripples and jumped to the human evolution side of history, especially our interactions with our Neanderthal cousins, who ruled the planet for 100,000 years before we nudged them out of existence. Next came the article about a new drug for the treatment of progeria. The story caught my attention, like spotting the first hummingbird of spring kissing my trumpet honeysuckles.…
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I’m not drunk, drunk. Not seeing double, drunk. Not gonna walk in a straight line though. Good thing I’m sitting down. I dunno, it’s been a long weekend. Whose idea was it to go from the bachelor party straight to the wedding? That one’s not on me.
Ow, what just poked me – oh… oh. Oh God, Kyle’s handing me the mic, he’s smiling at me oh my God. I know I’m not the best man but I’d be honored to make a speech. What do I even say? Uh oh, I’m standing up. Here goes nothing…
“Hey, I don’t really have much to say, but Kyle’s been my best friend since middle school and… and I love you man.” People clap. Kyle’s parents are smiling at me. …
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My brother Joe only sees the best of our mother. Whereas I recall her hands flying about my girlish body like angry birds, he recalls her fondly nursing him during his various childhood ailments. He is discomfited by my memories of her because they disrupt the gentle equilibrium he has laboriously structured about our ostensibly shared childhood and the mother who orchestrated it.
My brother ignores the abuses our little brother and I suffered from a petting zoo of perpetrators our mother maintained. She could have protected us, I insist, but she chose not to. Instead he offers the bromidic consolation that “she did the best she could” and he bristles at my retort that “her best wasn’t good enough.” We both agree that the lousy choices she made in life rendered her dependent upon the very men in her life who immiserated all of us.…
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In those first days after your death,
when I couldn’t cry,
there was nothing sadder than things you left behind.
Nothing sadder than the two tea bags of your favorite tea
that I found in a shoe box you carried from home to the office and back,
so much hope embodied in those tea bags – the anticipation
of having a moment between patients to steep a bag in a mug of hot water,
then to take a sip, and pause, and think, and take another sip.
I looked at those little paper bags of tea that your fingers touched,
and imagined you opening the pantry, selecting the tea, placing the bags delicately in the shoe
box, and tenderly carrying the box downstairs to the basement office where you saw patients on
the weekend, caring for their wounds and pains, listening to their stories,
and I felt the great distance between the promise embodied in those tiny bags of tea, and how
they were now left waiting in that sterile box,
all that promise of warmth and comfort gone.…
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