It was never part of the plan to have dinner with the tumor. But eventually it seemed like the only thing left to try. It didn’t go well.… more
It was never part of the plan to have dinner with the tumor. But eventually it seemed like the only thing left to try. It didn’t go well.… more
I loved the old room, though it was dim and ugly and old, stank of the pungent antiseptic soap we used to mop the mats and the brininess of sweat that couldn’t really be scrubbed away. It smelled like what it was: a box of straining bodies on a soft floor, blocked in by padded walls, a training ground that contained as much of yourself as you were willing to release.… more
I’m sure plenty of his friends’ parents stroll through his line, but I wondered how many of them had taken him to a concert in Detroit when he was 15, and if I was the first on a Saturday night, buying beer and sushi in a Dusty Rhodes t-shirt?… more
The last time I saw you, I didn’t know I’d miss who I was before the last time I saw you.… more
If his own brother refused to stand at parade rest in the middle of a replanted forest on the ridge line above a played-out coal mine and let him fire a copper jacket hollow point a few inches from his milk white face, I sure as hell was willing.… more
A maverick poet and old friend asked if I’d like to replace him teaching prison inmates. Why me? I wondered, and didn’t ask. Men I know don’t often speak directly, even to friends. If pressed, my friend might not have said. Anyway, I can’t ask. He died not long after from a heart attack.… more
I think of my grandmother, who had, by 1987, cooked nightly for my grandfather, for forty years. Was he ever this gentle with his criticism? Did he ever account for the myriad of ways that a roast can burn?… more
David’s no hero for beating some guy named John; square him off against Goliath, though, and heart makes history.… more
Of course I have cancer. Of course my body has turned against me. I am a writer. We ruminate on the awful, yield to it, wield it into something beautiful even when it isn’t, I want to say. I say nothing.… more
We’ve all chuckled at the theatrics of the stiff-legged subhumans in a zombie film. Brian was fried in a way that no Hollywood pathos I know of has successfully evoked.… more