Sometimes I think he’s better … and then we’re out to eat and the coughing begins and I forgot—he forgot, we forgot—an inhaler (which bag was it in??) and then the looks from the other diners start and I swear he’s not dying and I’m not a bad wife for...

With a vein of Lucille Clifton’s “In the Inner City” Our mothers left for work before we woke for school in Toledo in 1975 and our fathers left us latchkeys on the windowsill or under the mat in the inner part of the screen door. Our city was marked by...

he waves whenever I walk by. He lives four blocks away, and he lets the neighbor dogs poop in his yard. He lets mine. That says all you need to know about him, or all I needed to know. To say it’s okay for an animal to crap on your...

three pink roses sit out on a peeling window sill. No bigger than the tip of my thumb, they’re tucked in tiny thimbles of water. It’s a day when we walk back slowly from the community center, late summer heat, a strange, sticky silence on the streets. It starts to...

First day on the ship. Hodge shows me around. Here’s the mess deck. Here’s your rack. Your workspace, ragged. Oscar flag hanging from the bulkhead. Your shipmates, Beltowski, Pierpoli. That’s forward, aft. Pronounced folk-sul, bosun. Watch your head! Months go by. We cast off. So this is the ocean. Get...

In four years Caitlin will walk up the stairs of a barn in a cornfield wearing a white lace dress and a peony in her hair and become my wife, but presently I’ve known her for three weeks and a sheriff pulls her out of the driver’s seat and walks...

To swim, a person is often subjected to the horror of a gendered locker room. My girlfriend and I love to swim. We deserve to swim. But despite the signs plastered to the front of the locker room doors at our local public pool, people have the right to use...

I clicked up with a gang of my peeps at the payphone across the street from Brown Middle School. We were fourteen and school had just let out for the afternoon. The sun was bright and smiling down on us, just your average happy day. I called my girlfriend, Boo-boo-kitty-fuk,...

A week before my twenty-sixth birthday, I lie morphine-cradled in the recovery wing of Pelham Medical Center. I reek of sweat and surgical tape, blood and unsalted hospital beef, my hospital gown sweet with syrup from several spilled fruit cups. It’s Friday, which means I’ve been stagnant in bed for...

My town didn’t have much, but we had sunsets. Tremendous, spectacular sunsets, as if a Hollywood director had orchestrated the whole thing, lighting crews and special effects enlisted night after night, fulfilling notes that read: Bigger — More violet — Cue the eagle! In their glow we made promises, confessed,...

I could have a baby or I could buy a banjo I could write down my dreams each morning instead of eagerly surrendering them to the abyss of unmemory I could read the labels on food packaging buy organic eggs from happy chickens force myself to care about microplastics I...

My son Max is 13. Here’s how our conversation goes when I tell him to clean his room: “But you said we can’t recycle this plastic.” He picks up a soda-fountain cup that once held Dr. Pepper complete with plastic lid and plastic straw. “Perhaps you can divide your garbage...