word collection
Near the end of the three-hour drive, the car packed to bursting with clothes and Ikea shelves and collapsible laundry hampers and extra towels and chargers and everything else a freshman in college could possibly need, we stop in Milford, Connecticut. We get sandwiches at a Subway. It's just my mother and me. The bridge… Continue reading Folded Sky
My compass rose is a one-story green house on a street called Prospect, with a red mailbox and three bushes and a Japanese maple out front. Above the square white garage door are mounted three white tiles with a ribbon pattern and the numerals 4, 7, 5, beneath gutters that invariably clog with leaves in… Continue reading Turning From the East
There comes a point in life when you realize: the government isn’t real. It’s a collective delusion. We have all agreed to respect it. Its enforcement may be real; it is not. It’s the difference between table and wooden rods supporting a flat plank. It’s road, not static river of asphalt, something we have drizzled… Continue reading It Doesn’t Have to Be This Way
Lately I have been experiencing paranoia about food expiration. I sniff the milk every time. Sometimes I ask my roommates to sniff it as well. My search history includes when does and go bad an inordinate number of times. I always cook meat right away; I never freeze it because I don’t trust myself to… Continue reading Deadlines for Bygones
Every day on my walk to work, I pass the same three homeless people. First, outside Uprising Muffin Company, the thin, bearded man with inward-leaning legs, who sits holding an empty Starbucks cup. Sometimes it’s full of coffee. Second, the man on 12th Street whose massive pile of boxes serves as his bed, jutting several… Continue reading Blanket Statements
Everyone keeps telling us that we are so young. When they say that, I think about World War I. At twenty-three, I would have been a well-seasoned soldier. Or, of course, a well-seasoned nurse, stenographer, fiancée. War crosses my mind in these moments not out of morbidity but in some attempt to contextualize that word:… Continue reading Not So Young
On June 11, 2013, I went to confession. I wept the whole time. On the wall of my room at home hangs the lid of a hat-box. It was a cardboard hat-box; I say “was” because I have no idea what happened to the actual box. I decorated it—box and lid—at a Quaker retreat once,… Continue reading Hatbox Elegy
My family has always promoted the organic-free-range-no-high-fructose-corn-syrup lifestyle. I say “my family,” but really I mean my parents; I was usually an unenthusiastic participant in the community gardening and Tom’s of Maine toothpaste purchasing. In keeping with middle-class environmentalist philosophy, we kept a delightfully putrid compost pile nestled in the pachysandra shrubs of our New… Continue reading On Compost and Mambas
In a moment, however, wisely judging that one token of her shame would but poorly serve to hide another, she took the baby on her arm, and, with a burning blush, and yet a haughty smile, and a glance that would not be abashed, looked around at her townspeople and neighbours. On the breast of… Continue reading The New Scarlet Letter: Hester, Donald, and the Failure of Shame
When I was little, my parents told me that before I was born I was just a glimmer in their eyes. I took it literally. Before birth we hovered in the eyes of our parents, we people-to-be, golden pinprick gleams, waiting for the day we would swim down from the eyes into the dark warm… Continue reading Womb Crunch
