Category: Nonfiction
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1975 Prize Strawberry
She was of rounded belly and short muscular legs that carried her swiftly wherever she wanted to go. I was stick-thin and dreamily swayed with the breeze, eyes turned towards the far-off clouds and stars, wondering what laid beneath them so far away. Our hands and feet, soft and tender from their winter coverings of…
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Hokumpokes
This is love: to fly toward a secret sky, to cause a hundred veils to fall each moment. First to let go of life. Finally, to take a step without feet. —Rumi “Are you in the right place?” the woman pushing the broom asked me. Maybe not. I mean, I didn’t look like I belonged…
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Slur
In 1983, when I was six years old, I entered first grade and my first struggle over my given name. My mother claimed she agreed to name me Desirée because “It was a better choice than the Nazi names your father liked.” Apparently, my father had suggested they name me, his first child and my…
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The Flood
Seen from space, Kaua’i is round as a clock. The island, second to last in the arced Hawaiian archipelago, is mountain wrinkled, vivid green. The center of this clock, perhaps the nut bracing the dials, is Mount Waialeale, which in most years is the wettest place on the planet. Big storms often hit the islands,…
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Focus, Grit, and Painter’s Tape
The two yellow papers my sixth-grade science and math teachers had given me earlier that day for failing to do my homework were crumpled inside my backpack. I needed Mom to sign them, but it could wait. It was fall, and although I was already getting behind in my classes, the acorns and leaves were…
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Election Day 1960
The year I was eleven, John F. Kennedy ran for president. My father was a Nixon man, my mother undecided. Even those who preferred Dick Nixon were intrigued by the young Kennedy and one of my aunts went to see him at a New Haven campaign event. She said he looked younger in person than…
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The Unbearable Beauty of Now
The second positive pregnancy test—the one where you know it wasn’t a fluke, that it really stuck this time—came a few days after the first one, on my 35th birthday. “How many babies are we talking?” We wouldn’t know for a few weeks yet. Not until we were knee-deep into that bloody obstacle course of the…
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The Body Snatching Spell of Bipolarism
There’s a scene near the end of the 1978 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers—the one with Donald Sutherland—that I’ve always found disturbingly familiar. One of the last human survivors, Nancy, approaches Sutherland’s character seeking safety and escape after being separated while running for their lives from the body snatchers. Nancy doesn’t know that he…
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Otto’s Links
“It’s a bit early.” I smelled whiskey as I walk into Ira Jackson’s apartment on St. Mark’s Place, in New York City’s East Village, for my 11am saxophone lesson. Ira came to NY after graduating Cass Tech High School in Detroit and made a living playing saxophone for decades. Ira is about 5’ 6”, mustache, goatee,…