Paris changes, poet Charles Baudelaire wrote, faster than the human heart, and as far as my neighborhood is concerned, he was right. We’d hardly settled into our new digs before people starting tearing things up.
A painting supposedly produced before 1945 that contains traces of strontium-90 and caesium-137 is most likely a forgery: these isotopes do not occur naturally and are produced in nuclear explosions, […]
“We should always have a goal of maintaining harmony.”
At this point, I was pretending to do coke, dramatically rendered little bumps, because parts of me ached and swole and it wasn’t as easy to take in anymore. All my cavities were fighting me. I was so stupid at this time.
When I was her age, I didn’t believe I belonged in the world. I didn’t believe I deserved anything good. If I could time travel to meet that teenaged version of myself I would tell him: Life is shitty right now. You have to live through it anyway. See you in a while.
Seeing forever didn’t quell my agitation. It was hard not to think about flames and smoke, to imagine the feeling of being hopelessly far from the street below, and then to feel all the dimensions of the room you’re in give way at once, and for what—to hold down a job, to look out over the Hudson? It wasn’t a good death. I watched the planes banking northeast out of Newark, or crossing midtown on their way into LaGuardia, as if my vigilance would do a damn thing for me or for anyone.
Thirteen days after Michael passed away, the towers came down. Clouds, plumes of smoke. That night, invoices and letterheads blanketed the streets. I read by candlelight the names that appeared on each. Childhood, as I knew it, ceased.
The following essay is in reference to “We All Do What We Can,” the new “short story + music” track released today by E.A. Aymar and DJ Alkimist. It’s hard […]
My husband and I set out to have a child in the usual way. Our zygote was, of course, an aspect of our imagination—a he or a she, hair dark […]
My personal memory of “The Greatest Game,” the Baltimore Colts versus the New York Giants, on Dec. 28, 1958, is now nearly fifty-eight years old. Both teams had won their […]
