Last week– Philip Levine dies. Out of sight, out of reach, in another state, elderly, aged, complete. No one I have ever met. I reread his poems, fall back in…

I can clock my love life by the timing of these mini-essays– something ends, bam, a big one, a-sock-it-to-you-hard, motherfucker of an essay, a see-what-you-can’t-have– Virginia Woolf meets Borat: you…

You walk your kid to the beach, alone, although it’s Sunday, and for the last six weeks or so, Sundays have kinda been your thing– the four of you– your…

“I’ve never been anywhere,” says the Tattooed Neighbor, with a faint note of aggression, like he’s daring me to judge him. “I’ve been everywhere,” I say back, shrugging. Of course,…

It’s raining– fat drops bouncing back against themselves in the pool, visible through the sliding glass doors of the greenhouse, where I stand and close my eyes, let Neko Case’s…

Saturday morning I am bleary-eyed from lack of sleep, wandering around in a half-daze with fleeting flashes of someone else’s mouth on mine and bizarre lines of poetry flitting through…

Here are the facts about the tattooed neighbor, as they currently stand: He’s 28. The youngest of three children. I remember his older brother rather distinctly– a senior when I…

It’s past 10 on a school night, and there I am, wildly kissing my neighbor in his backyard, in his daughter’s playhouse. Earlier, we texted, as we’ve done for the…

Dear __________, You are not the Reader I address here, although you do, of course, read this; I know it. Sometimes, at random, when I haven’t written a thing in…

Reader, there must be a resolution to this, a way to make sense of it; or am I writing a Modernist novel, a Proustian text that goes on forever? I…