When collateral damage becomes acceptable, the room dims. The brokenness of the world is no longer the problem of others.
After hip surgery, my father’s memory is all over the map. As he recuperates in rehab, he tells us he’s been to Spain, England, Oakland and even Kabul, all in t...
I have a student who is failing my class. He wants to be writer, but he comes to me and tells me that he can’t write because he is depressed. He is wearing paja...
If recovery means you are no longer sick, or even that you are simply functioning again, then perhaps I have recovered.
If I were a religious person, I would say something blessed me that day. But I’m not a religious person. Perhaps some part of me believed, as I still do, in the...
"Did you know some hospitals have an entire department dedicated to rape victims?"
We avoid their touch by pissing our pants on purpose. Boys don’t want to fondle girls who piss their pants. Fucking babies. We hide. We find a way out of the wo...
I want to shout that I had only had one beer. I want to jump back in the cab and pray that the driver takes me home even though I don’t have any cash for him. B...
Sometimes you lie so much you begin to believe what you say. Sometimes you don’t even have to say the lies out loud to believe them.
I was in the kind of love that puts a rock in your heart and stuffs your eyes with cotton, but you hold that rock and that cotton. Because that’s all you’ve got...
She says she’s got Borderline Personality Disorder. That’s like the worst thing you can have, worse than Bipolar. I feel better being around her because suddenl...
This is the place I remember—with its pine branches, hung like lace canopies. There is the rock slab where they took turns, each first pounding his chest, then ...
It wouldn’t be the last time I tried to cure a broken heart with recklessness.
I had been looking out of the window, just ten feet away. I had been at that spot since they began shooting and I knew I hadn’t moved, turned my head nor blinke...
We are real people. We live in the aftermath of violence. We live with the consequences of too many guns and too few regulations. And the story doesn’t end the ...
I never knew you. The books still talked about you in terms of food: This week your baby is the size of a poppy seed. This week your baby is the size of a plum....
Redacted Relationship By Keith Hoerner
"She confided that she’d actually been divorced twice. “Now I’ve switched to women,” she added, as if it were another accomplishment. I was suddenly aware of th...
I want to tell you about your death because I feel some guilt about the final events of that night. I have repressed the guilt in order to keep living but I nee...
I’d talked with firefighters about extension — how a fire spreads — all the while constructing, mentally rehearsing and refining an elaborate plan for my own de...
