The construction guys are wearing neon hoodies and eating grilled cheese sandwiches, Sprinkled across the lawn like lobster buoys — “Confetti thrown from heaven,” you’d call them When I was on the boat and couldn’t sleep. If I went back … Read More
This poem not about flowers just goes to show how far we’ve come since the days when people could practically not think without a daffodil, when in poetry a rose was not yet just a rose but always stood for … Read More
I was seventeen. A senior second semester saturated with drugs, alcohol and bad decisions written off as “youth” had ended in a hospital bed on prom night, and, subsequently, in daily, forced AA meetings. I’d thought I was on top of the world: going to an Ivy League school, surrounded by friends, graduating top of my class.
“Excuse me, do you have an extra cigarette?” I asked a woman outside New York Penn Station on my way home from Reunions in June. As I inhaled, the previous nine months began to transform from life to memory, things that were happening to things that had happened, becoming things that had happened to me rather than things I had made happen.
My sister started her coming-out process in eighth grade. My brother and I were in seventh. She entered her final year of middle school feeling alienated and afraid, so when the girl next to her in homeroom showed up with a print-out of Sid Vicious taped to her binder, Steph seized the opportunity to make a friend. Her name was Anna. She was thirteen, wore rainbow-banded tights and sometimes smelled like cigarettes. Her screen name was “kind-o-kinky.” She was the first bisexual any of us had ever known.
If you are reading this article, you are surely already aware that April 20 marks the annual celebration of cannabis. In the spirit of the holiday, I would like to offer a little tribute to this strange plant that has … Read More
