Guest Post The phone rang. My newborn must have been asleep—I have no recollection of her at that moment—but my two preschoolers were with me, and I realized later that I had repeated the horrific news aloud. Thus, for months, my kids sat together at their play table to reenact the conversation. “What do you mean, shot?” “She’s dead?” That evening my husband called from the hospital to say he would be home late, and I foolishly unloaded the news... Read more
Continued from yesterday. Four years ago, my wife and I moved into our red brick cottage. The living room and bedroom walls were a bright pink; the kitchen floor was green linoleum; a small yellow ball with a star rolled around, but we had no pet to play with it. It was as if we were living in someone else’s house. They left their presence behind. In the last few months, when my wife brought up the possibility of moving... Read more
The first thing I’m drawn in by in Margaret Rabb’s “Love’s Alchemy” is the lusciousness of the language. Alliteration and rhymes abound, and the iambic pentameter of the sonnet form holds the sounds together. Then as I re-read, I see that at the poem’s center is the wife of the 17th century poet John Donne. Anne Donne did indeed bear twelve children, and the final birth killed her: so there’s historical truth to the line “A dozen births Anne Donne... Read more
This post originally appeared in Good Letters on October 20, 2011 In the last few years, my school has made a huge push towards what our Global Studies’ Director refers to as “glocalism.” In essence, glocalism encapsulates the idea that we are all of us citizens of various communities, both local and global, and that being glocal citizens entails envisioning ourselves as active members of both a local neighborhood community, as well as a world community. He often uses the... Read more
On the phone, he says, Your mother throws me over her shoulder and carries me across the parking lot to the club house, the dining room. (She rolls his walker to a corner of the dining room where it won’t obstruct the servers and other residents who have come tonight for dinner.) His sense of humor: alive and well. We’re flying now, he says. You’re lucky. There are telephones now. Telephones spare you from the worst of the damage... Read more
Just a few miles from my home in Rochester, NY, is the house where Susan B. Anthony lived for most of her adult life. Her house is now a National Historical Landmark, though I remember what a struggle it was for local women to attain that designation for the house some thirty to forty years ago. Sexism, like racism, dies hard. Thanks to the ongoing work of dozens of volunteers, the house has been restored, and tours of it—rich with... Read more
My father told me that when he used to bird hunt through the Kilgore Hills in Northeast Mississippi, he would sometimes come upon a whisky still or two. This was back in the late thirties and forties, long after prohibition had ended, but the whisky makers were still easily spooked. Revenuers were still on the prowl, I suppose. At any rate, the stills would be bubbling and smoking along as my father passed by with his setters—Nell or Snow Boy.... Read more
This summer is marked by smoke, our town covered in an urgent haze from nearby wildfires. I sympathize with the neighboring communities that are directly impacted. Homes burned, life plans changed, suddenly, and without much warning. In Carrie Jerrell’s narrative poem “The Fire Tower” we first meet a willful girl determined to make the steep, revolving climb up a fire tower staircase and we follow her to adulthood where she faces an unexpected, terminal diagnosis. The three stanzas in the... Read more
Guest Post by Laura Bramon This post originally appeared at “Good Letters” on August 18, 2008. The birds’ wings shake out the smell of the men who sleep in the park: the smell of meat, sweat, and bread. The birds lift up and fly away as I ride my bike through the park’s courtyard, and in the trees a stone Cardinal sits on a throne, staring down at the ground where the men slept. Now it is morning and the... Read more
I am entering the Age of Subtraction. Almost as if there existed an imperceptible fulcrum I had to get over, and I’m now finding myself sliding on the downside. So much of adult life until now was about Addition—collecting experiences and perspectives—countries been to and books read, bands seen—and then a husband and family and job, and eventually, stuff. Though relatively speaking, not all that much stuff. And certainly not any small, precious, “curated” collection of stuff that “sparks joy”... Read more
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