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there is more in this world than fear and pee

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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...
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a very short story about hegemony

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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...
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fairy ring

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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...
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if nevada alexandra

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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...
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cellulitis

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Photo by Joshua Chehov on Unsplash After we left the hospital, I took him back to the hospital.  His eye looks puffy, I told the pediatrician in the emergency department. (A Tuesday morning, nearly empty, but haunted by the specters of our first visit. The coughing unhoused. The vocal elderly. My own spouse with her lost voice.) I don't think the infection is back. Take a few pictures throughout the day to see if anything changes, but he's probably fine. He didn't know he was telling an alcoholic to make herself a cocktail. He didn't know that document lurks just behind fight and flight . Soon my photos were a grid of my child's face. More so than usual, I mean. Close-ups, not sliding-down-the-slide shots. His brown-black eyes and smooth brown skin. But was it smooth enough? Was that sudden blush evidence of the tantrum he just had (brother reclaiming iPad) or the creep of fever? Was that a scratch or the red slash of infection? I touched each photo and spread two ...
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every year contains days, but also

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Every day contains years, like how yesterday was briefly 1985 and Jenessa's dad was right there, his glasses and strawberry blonde mustache and crew socks, groaning "Ness" about something she said. What she said as we stood in the fog watching our children climb rocks forty years later— my god—is that he was okay for a while after treatment, and then he wasn't, but he refused to talk about it. It's almost next year now. This morning at the kids' museum, I watched my toddler climb a contraption made of fiberglass and fisherman's nets, which dredged up from the seafloor another museum— The Museum of Memory is always open, always dusty— in which my older child pined to ride The Red Bikes on the mini track outside. He was the right size for the low yellow four-wheelers, but the red tricycles had the candy apple sheen of the future. (The Museum of the Future only comes in two flavors, shiny and apocalypse, and sometimes it is closed for repairs.) You probably s...
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tops of 2024

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At Thanksgiving, my uncle asked how I was doing. I said not much was new, and that I was old enough to understand how that was a good thing. He agreed. He’s going through treatment for prostate cancer (fortunately he has a good prognosis), and his stepson died suddenly in October. I want to be hopeful and creative and ambitious, but in 2024, I was grateful for a quiet year. If I weren’t so superstitious, I would say that I did some healing from the tumult of 2020-2023 (pandemic, adoption fails, new baby, job loss, new job). Meanwhile, it was a devastating year–yet another one of those–globally.  And in my personal quiet, I read 60+ books. I watched and listened to some things too, albeit less rigorously. I finally discovered what the fuss is all about re: The Great British Baking Show (it’s so charming! Perhaps you’ve heard?). So here is my annual roundup, with my annual caveat that a lot of these recommendations aren’t new, just new to me.  Books I’m grouping my top three bo...
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