Fun Fact about Me: I have an ancestor who was a governor of the Jamestown colony, the first permanent British settlement in North America. That means I have ancestors that were here a decade before the Mayflower. But guess what? He was still an immigrant! Every year or so since the Great Recession, we seem […]
Words From The Other Side
The Thing About Birthdays
It’s my birthday, but the clouds are offended again because of something I’ve said or thought. Their bellies are full of dark-sick, gauzy vomit, pushing away the sky which doesn’t remember I’m nine today. People are talking about the moon, how there are men on it for the first time, but people have told me […]
Tristan vs. Yoga
One Saturday last spring I got up early to join my friends for a yoga lesson at the Indianapolis Museum of Art. This is a totally lovely museum, and nothing that transpired was in any way the museum’s fault. The night before yoga, I’d attended a peer workshop where I hadn’t been assertive enough and my […]
Glass Boys
I’m an old man now, but I was a boy once, and I saw things—adults with backward rollercoaster eyes, muddy backhoe faces, steel wool fingers, javelin forearms that could tack anything they wanted to a wall, a floorboard, a bed board, or a rusty bedspring creaking for rescue. I was a glass boy then, blown […]
Red Square, a Cookie, and Bukowski
Out the window spreads the neighborhood where Behemoth wandered. From this vantage point above I witness nightfall across Patriarch Ponds. Sunlight is gradually replaced by the street lamps, twinkling candles on cafe verandas, and the dim glow of cigarettes. This cozy neighborhood is as much Russian as it is European, if not for the Cyrillic signage […]
The Thing About Clowns
A long time ago, I had an imaginary friend who was a clown. Then he shape-shifted into a ghost, then into my parents, then into a gaggle of coiled cobras that happened to look and act a lot like my parents. But first he was a clown. His makeup ran and his tongue tended to […]
