What is this urge we have, to take and to tame, to plant a flag and make it ours? Mountains laid flat, pipelines drilled, verdant body ravaged, beaten and exposed. Children pulled from the bomb-shattered ruins of cities of no longer. A world of ours and never ours.
Read MoreLooking at the picture of the lambs gestating in plastic, my neck gets rigid and all the tiny hairs stand on end. I think: Who needs a handmaid when you have a plastic bag? Then I tell myself to stop thinking like that. I swallow my fear and look back out the window. Daffodils open, then die in a week’s time, and then come the tulips, whose petals remind me of the skirts of handmaids, turned upside down and blooming.
Read MoreOrestes is still licking the complex wounds of his original loss. We lose our childhoods again and again until we don’t. Some people never get to the don’t. Beer bottle after beer bottle to his mouth worsens his already depressive position.
Read MoreI write to survive. Or writing has been a coping mechanism. Or writing has given me a way to tell my story over and over because parts of my body story will never leave me. I have come to terms with the fact that if I live to be seventy years old, there may be something in the air to give me a flashback into the portal of trauma. The portal could begin with an image or a name or the way my eyes look deeper when I am sad. Anything can transport me back.
Read More
