Bread and Bread

1. not so much a litquake but a lit-tremor We left the West Oakland BART station at a reasonable time. It was raining lightly. I reviewed what I was going to read that night as the train rumbled beneath the bay. AK made sure the brakes were set on Dash’s stroller and kept him entertained until we arrived in the Mission. In the Mission, it was pouring. I’d forgotten that San Francisco has a completely different microclimate from the East Bay. We were up north for a long weekend, staying with Pedro and Stephen, who were brave enough to put up two adults and a toddler for four whole nights. Their pit bull, Sugar, spent a lot of the weekend shut in Stephen and Pedro’s bedroom, so she made the biggest sacrifice. (Thank you, Sugar, if you’re reading.) The catalyst for the trip was my reading, which was a small part of Mutha Magazine ’s event, which was a small part of LitCrawl, which is a big part of LitQuake. Author photo. #NailedIt We followed my map app for six blocks befor...

Every few months, I try to write a letter to Dash. They’re descriptive and mundane. This one came out as a kind of prose poem, and it captures my current mood. Father G says heaven is the present. I repeat this to myself, which is an act of memory, which is to say: the past. This is the time of year when the future shakes its fist. Late afternoons in Los Angeles are a Maxfield Parrish painting. As if your 20-month-old skin needed any help. It is the color of toast, smooth as flan. You look west and I spy on you from inches away, your legs against my hip, your face even with mine. In low light your irises and pupils blend to black, but here I see the clear brown ring. You want to ride in your green plastic car, the one with the handle in back, for a grownup to push. I am shoeless, but you’ll cry if we go inside again, so I lap the block barefoot, feeling trashy and wrecked, which I am. Pods dropped from trees bite my soles. You have discovered the joy of dragging your feet a...