In a second union, things you took for granted during those years with your first spouse float in your unconscious like twigs along a clear or muddied stream, o...
Life with Dad was an endless game. We shot candles out of Mother's silver candelabra on the picnic table. I learned to drive racing the jeep around hay bales in...
Only when the moon rises do I see it, see her—the glint of silver and then green and silver, the flash of scales. Only then do I know: my mother is a mermaid, a...
Does it start with what damaged him—a father who only survived starvation in a series of Japanese POW camps because he was a natural scientist, a botanist, who ...
He waited until after we had made love for the first time to reveal his age. He was thirty-six years older than me. I knew he was older, but this confession too...
How does one find self-worth standing before the evidence of broken dreams, unrealized potential, and past mistakes? This is what plagued me as I stared at the ...
I’m not sure if my mistake was in joining together reality and fantasy or if I simply was treading someplace where I didn’t belong.
By morning, there were no pauses left to count. The winter chill crept into the room as Dad lay lifeless.
Stories are my past. They bob along a lazy river waiting to be plucked up, cherished, and set back down to drift. But they are images, merely snapshots in free ...
After August 31, the good mornings and goodnights disappeared. In the push/pull of bipolar, as he muddled through the anhedonia, ambivalence, and anxiety, his c...
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...
If recovery means you are no longer sick, or even that you are simply functioning again, then perhaps I have recovered.
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...
I think these people mean to say, that my mother with Alzheimer’s, behaves differently from the mother I knew without Alzheimer’s.
It wouldn’t be the last time I tried to cure a broken heart with recklessness.
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...
* Featured Artwork: By Michelle Nguyen Addicted to Love: 38 Special By Tanner Ballengee “I woke up this morning with a piece of past caught in my throat, ...
I sit out in the chill wet evening, all the roses are dead on the bushes, waiting and hoping and knowing, here we are at last and so soon.
