In Sickness and In Health

"A light here required a shadow there." —Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse     The dream is always the same. He imagines a book lying on a table,...

What spilled glasses we’ll be when the disaster is over! What friable underbrush, what sluggish dust now, but what tipsy geese, what soused bathing suits we’ll be when the disaster...

You were embryo #10. You brewed in your petri dish, doubling every day in the low-humming laboratory. I imagined you, exposed under the microscope,...

Holobiont. Agustín Fuentes gave me this new word at the beginning of the New Year, during the On Being podcast with Krista Tippet titled...

“We’ll call her Marie Maroo if she’s a girl,” my father teased. “If it’s good enough for a boat, it’s good enough for our...

My husband’s aunt died of COVID-19 last week. She stopped breathing as her son and husband were driving her to the hospital. By the...

Diphenhydramine, Spironolactone. Celebrex, Xtandi, Robaxin. I would sort my father's pills by linguistic patterns: syllable count, consonance, alliteration. I liked Omeprazole because it sounded...

I sanitized, gowned, tied the billowing fabric around my waist and neck. Then: blue gloves over cuffs, face shield over N95, breath cocooned in...

ONCE, MORE THAN ONCE Huffing and puffing, Dr. Frye arrived late in the evening to visit Northridge Hospital. Frey would worry about my tragedy, already learning my brain...

That day, I was Windexing my mother’s coffee table. It was probably a Saturday. My mother sat on one end of her hunter-green couch...

A vessel displayed in the Vatican’s Etruscan Museum depicts a Greek goddess, Eos, mourning her son. Memnon was a celebrated leader of the Trojan...

++++this day I wasn’t in my body anymore. spineless in the reflection of widespread windows barriers of glass doors closing, needles and beeping and jumpsuits eyes and warm sheets.   I met many...