Bread and Bread

Photo by Oksana Vasilieva on Unsplash A white tree in a California winter scarred with graffiti looks like a birch in the taiga which (I learned last year) is the part of Russia where no one can live, or no one wants to Look, I know nothing about Russia, but I'm learning how official stories are farcical  but enforced by the state's jagged metal teeth and people vanish in the snow Yesterday I learned the man who shaves goat meat off a vertical spit on the busiest corner in my neighborhood was taken by ICE His absence is the absence of smoke while I wait at a red light (Look, I know nothing) and, for his family, a vertical spit piercing their hearts Masha from Pussy Riot  charts a path through the snow for those of us who are learning: When they say you can't assemble send one activist at a time When you're locked up with your lover fuck her while you can Masha lives in Iceland now because bodies are not infinite but her love for the people of Russia is a steady global ...

Years ago, when I was deep in the grief and angst of cancer and infertility, a lay counselor at church shared a Buddhist saying about everyone having ten thousand joys and ten thousand sorrows in their lives. It didn't do much for me at the time, but I think about it a lot now. Stories have arcs and meaning. Real life is more scattershot. I got through the sorrows of my 2010s and went on to have more joys and more sorrows...and 2025 was a bit heavy on the latter, to be honest.  I am so superstitious that I don't want to say "it was a bad year" because It Could Have Been So Much Worse, because it still could be [insert evil eye emoji], but a year that kicks off with your city catching fire isn't the easiest thing to bounce back from. ("But Cheryl," says my inner Cheryl, "YOUR neighborhood didn't burn.") Then Joey landed in the hospital for a week ("Only a week! He was fine! Antibiotics did the trick!"), which tipped my hyper-vigil...

I take a walk and do the exercise my therapist taught me: something I can see, something I can hear, something I can smell, something I can feel, something I can taste. At first I can’t remember the fifth sense, and I worry it’s a sign of a problem with my brain (other than the ones I know about: the ruminations, the anxiety, the sadness that touches down like a tornado). Or it’s lack of coffee. I’m walking to a coffee shop. I like this exercise because it’s also a writing exercise, and I like the words that offer themselves: clicking crow, ladies gathered for cafecito, the sugar and oil of cooking pastries on the breeze . I try to taste my tongue and it feels slightly burnt, which is not a taste, and…is that something I should worry about? Dash is worried about my work trip next week. And angry and sad. He says he’s going to miss me so much that he wants a different mom, one who doesn’t ever have to travel for work. I try to explain how that makes no sense, but doesn’t it actually mak...

Photo by Sincerely Media on Unsplash My cousin's husband says his family was robbed by undocumented immigrants when he was a kid, only he doesn't say "undocumented." That's what the cops told his family. To me it sounds like something cops would say if they couldn't solve a crime, but I might be wrong.  He baits me: Wait until they come for you. Do YOU want to spend your time with criminals? Share your bed with gang members?  I tell him I have spent a lot of time with gang members, most of them citizens, and it was just fine. I say MS 13 is an American export. We should apologize to El Salvador. I say I didn't know that wanting someone not to be deported and dehumanized meant I had to marry them.  My cousin's husband dares me to share a bathroom with a trans woman, only he doesn't say "trans woman." I do, that very weekend, in a pizza restaurant in a college town. I wash my hands next to her in the trough sink. I think she is kind of cut...

Photo by Dave Hoefler on Unsplash I wish I was more connected to my ancestors,  I tell Nicole, after she says she talks to her mom and grandma.  Let's face it: I am a middle-aged white woman. Of course I want this. But I cannot join the folklorico group, and my grandmother has never spoken to me in the form of a luminescent manta ray. I am not Moana.  Nicole and I share cancer-dead mothers, and fear of our own genetic codes. At the coffee shop, a friend of a friend is talking about her engagement. She and her boyfriend went hiking in Santa Cruz. She planned to propose. She designed a pendant for him, a sunflower with an opal at its center and a spiral on the back. For growth and interconnectedness, she says. They were deep in the forest, the dappled sunlight starting to fade. The right moment had not yet  announced itself, and so the young woman seized the one they were in.  Would you— The young man said, Wait!  He put his knee to the forest floor, and pre...

the boy with the girl's name, had been able to follow his father from house to house  to White House he would have said Stop, look at me — and presented his face, still made of newborn clay, but already hinting at the fullness of humanity: furrowed brow, bowed lips, eyes watching his parents' every move. If Nevada Alexandra's eyes had been given the gift of time, they would have settled into a mirror of his father's: cash-green, with flecks of darkness. Nevada Alexandra listened from the womb  as his father spat out his own father's words and then ran from them. Safe inside his mother,  Nevada Alexandra gave her the gift of grief, bits of genetic code lodged in her bloodstream forever, tasting like ache and impossibility. She broke, forever— or so she would have said, but he saw her grow into a twisted vine. Nevada Alexandra watched over the next baby, a girl with a boy's name, and whispered, Your eyes are your own, and they can change with the light. But Nevada...