Author Archives: E

A man camped in the windowed lobby of the bank, Saturday night. He’s got himself propped on blankets in the corner and he’s reading a book. I’m outside with the a baby who’s out too late, I’m fitting blanket and bottles into a bag, I’m lifting her sweaty form out of the stroller, collapsing the [...]

I will run one hundred miles this month, I will learn to play a song on the guitar. My husband is away, but he calls, nearly-nightly, from Canada, via that imperfect miracle of video telephone. There, on the northern prairie, the yard behind him is green like spring and full of long light. Here, it’s [...]

Writing just to not forget that we were married two weeks ago, under a tree in the courthouse lawn. That morning, we dragged a kayak out into the Tred Avon River, navigated out of the shallows, and wrote our vows on pieces of paper folded against our knees. The next evening, we again kayaked out [...]

You move, again, this time to the north-facing rooms of an old house on an old street. You stand on your porch and look over into the backyard of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s city home. You unpack your books and fill the shelves, and you settle in. The person you intend to love for the rest [...]

I nap, unnecessarily, on the first hot afternoon of the year, just for the open window and the sunlight and the feeling of being a little uncomfortably warm. Two days later, the heat breaks and the rain begins. On the weekend, I’m driving an old-ish car with a sunroof and leather seats just beginning to [...]

Inferior and distal and dorsal and posterior and caudal and all their correlates. I’ve taken to memorizing the little things, like taking a picture, here the crease just in front of the tragus of his ear. Anterior is the word you’d use, anterior to the tragus. It’s where I rest my thumb when I hold [...]

This morning it rained, but at four in the afternoon, I left the locked psychiatric ward and walked into the vestiges of day. The sky was grand and mottled with clouds, the pavement luminescent from the storms, the late sunlight making something surreal out of the green stone church at the top of the hill. [...]

For the third time in my life, I sleep in a room that’s adjacent to a flat roof. (In the warmest days of autumn, I’d step out of the window, blackening the bottoms of my feet on the tar paper.) Tonight, it’s snowed under, just an inch or two, as are the roofs and porches [...]

Just north of the city jail: marble stoops chipped at the corners, the exterior walls doorless and windowless and muted with plywood. The friezes have crumbled away from the roofs and left the upper rooms open to the sky. It’s winter, but forget for a minute all this stalled decay. Already the days are lighter, [...]

In Mali this summer, I always thought of dusk and dust together, the day ending and the loose sand rising from the bare ground, grayish clouds of engine exhaust in the streets. Here, in the winter, the elision comes apart. On my way to dinner this evening, the harbor was blue and gold in the [...]