I don’t know how to hold onto the warmth of the image of Ray picking up the kids, dappled in sunlight, with the statistics of suicide that run through my mind as I think about Lizzie.
(nonfiction)
Category: Nonfiction
One morning I once tried to boycott mandatory COVID tests as a small gesture of resistance, but the first day I didn’t show up, I got a text message that same night warning me that there would be consequences. It didn’t say what the consequences would be.
(nonfiction)
They who love so lawlessly your laws cannot contain them. They who sacrifice so willingly you are willing to sacrifice them.
(nonfiction)
Anesthesia for the moment. Anesthesia for the pain. The anesthesiologist’s line: “Don’t worry, you won’t remember this when you wake up,” is precisely what worried me. I didn’t remember. What else had I missed?
(nonfiction)
By seventh grade students often work with percentages, fractions, probability and proportional relationships. Math looks different at our Long Covid house. We practice for survival, not standardized testing. What percentage of a medication is metabolized by the liver? By the kidneys? What fraction of the pediatric population gets well?
(nonfiction)
The way I’d savor, lovesick, a stricken voice preserved on tape as if in amber. The way I banked those messages. Playing them over and again as proof that once, I had made him care. Echo of skin and moisture and shine and shame. Power diminishing with repetition.
(nonfiction)
You cleaned buckwheat in Ukraine and you’ll continue in America. You even brought a sack of groats with you. Were you afraid you’d starve in this great capitalist country?
(nonfiction/Ukraine)
There was another reason why I opted not to become a doctor like my daddy. He was the only pediatric urologist in town, so he left for work before I woke, shuttled between two hospitals throughout the day, and returned home after my bedtime. Unbeknownst to me, when he would come to give me a goodnight kiss while I was fast asleep, I’d stick out my tongue at him.
(nonfiction)
I like art best when its artifice dissolves. Pull back the curtain: It’s me, looking sheepish. Which me is almost irrelevant: I’ll answer to any name you call. Surrendering is only erotic when what you’ve held inside too long has named you. Made you its shape.
(nonfiction)
At 4 a.m. I am awakened by a vision of the river goddess. I am told without words that she saved baachan from drowning. After the funeral of my great-baachan. After a mokugyo drum was broken through. After a shaman sprinkled gold dust into the house’s fire.
(nonfiction)
