May Joseph Cricket Sounding Darkness March 5, 2016 An abandoned house with red tiled roof in decay rises across the small hill. It appears so much smaller, innocuous, from how I remember it. It is my mother’s childhood…
Browsing: Prose
Mrs. Yip the funeral director called. “Your father must have loved you children so much, because when I touched his body the skin disintegrated in my hands.” My father’s will to live through his two years of terminal colon cancer…
By now, it’s a familiar lament. Usually it hits mid-semester, when the honeymoon period is over and the work has really piled up. I ask them how they’re doing, and in response they cover their faces with their hands and…
When I finally sit down to write poetry at 9 p.m. in my “office” – which is my laptop sitting on my long wooden dining room table – I usually hear a drama-filled voice start calling, “Mama, mama, come quick!…
Dear Kindergarten Teacher, I am going out of town this week. My husband and Henry are coming with me because Henry is still nursing and can’t be away from me for more than twelve hours or else my milk will…
My husband and I recently took Grace, who is seven, to see The Avengers. She had never seen a super hero movie before, and within two or three minutes, she was completely hooked. She reached her hands out to “touch”…
I am a maker. Thoughts are words, words are the building materials. I hesitate to say bricks as they, the words, I mean, are as malleable as play-do, as changeable as water. I am, though, inert. My being is set,…
Seven years ago, we left our Upper West Side co-op for many reasons. My husband needed a driveway. My toddler deserved a bedroom with windows. I had to get out of the kitchen — that narrow room, where, cramped in…
A pen in hand works like bloodletting. Something in the gut. It’s the Voice of all voices asking to reign and leave my body behind, but I need more time. I trust other people when I want to believe they’re…
I love having a belly full of babies. There are two in there, a boy and a girl, and my body gets busy making them arms and legs and hearts. I leave my job a few months early, supposedly to…