Blog : Beautiful-Things
The Heavy Bag
| October 18, 2021 For three years of my teenage life, I fought. Around 5 PM each day, I'd walk into the boxing gym—a repurposed garage—and carefully wrap up my hands, winding the black cloth over and over my wrist and palm, in and out through my knuckles, until my hands felt safe.
Two Hot Zabagliones
| October 11, 2021 Feeling lonely and hopeless, I went ahead anyway. Long before computers took over the planet, ManMate, a gay dating service, mailed me a multipage paper form to complete.
Lamp Light
| October 4, 2021 I'm not worried about the meat in the freezer or the milk in the fridge. The only concern I have about the sudden soupy darkness is how I can maximize my time spent soaking in it.
Blues
| September 27, 2021 He taught the dog to howl when it was just a puppy. I’d find the two of them sitting on the couch together, both tipping their faces skyward, eyes closed, solemn, focused. The little beast mimicked his best friend, his idol, his everything—in harmony, they pursed their lips and aroooo-ed as loud as their lungs could push their animal voices.
The Inside of Bones
| September 20, 2021 His small voice cuts a jagged line into the not-quite-morning quiet. My body reflexively lifts out of bed, finds its way over the piles of tiny cars and books, through the stone darkness of our new apartment, our first without his father. I steer myself into the bedroom he shares with his younger brother, find his bed, crawl in.
The Last Perfection
| September 13, 2021 The week-old "Going out of Business" sign sagged in the store window the last night my father baked. Bread and sandwich buns near midnight. Coffee cakes and sweet rolls at two a.m. Last, as always, the deep-fried doughnuts were finished near dawn while my mother readied the display cases where cookies, cakes and pies were already waiting for their last opportunity to sell. At six-thirty, he filled cream puffs and whoopee pies, and then he drove home to sleep.
Life Takes Place Like This
| September 6, 2021 My student tells me she is going home and then is found hanging by a shower rod on Tuesday afternoon. We do not sleep. All that was hers is now ours to sort through. We speak about her now in past tense.
Filling Cupboards
| August 30, 2021 You don't start out with coffee cups. You start with single-serve espressos and chai lattes at the coffee shop around the corner from your co-op. But a coffee together after work becomes morning coffee for two.
Resting Place
| August 23, 2021 When we arrive at daycare, I step out of the car and close my door gently, hoping not to startle my son awake. As I open the back door to retrieve him from his car seat, I see the bird.
Ascension Garden
| August 16, 2021 The first time, you drive by yourself. You have some idea you are going there, but are still surprised that you know the way, without her, through the turning and turning driveways. Left, left, left, left. Park near the rusted dripping spigot.
Merriment
| August 9, 2021 I was walking to the store with my brother when we stumbled upon a father teaching his daughter to ride a bike. He was in his early thirties, the age my father must have been when he left us, with a widow's peak and roseate cheeks.
Home to Roost
| August 2, 2021 I liked the hens, with their kind eyes and soft, red feathers. I was seven, and I wanted to sleep with them, to nestle with them, because they felt like a dozen mothers, all watching out for me. My real human mother said I could, so I took a blanket down there at bedtime and laid it out on the floor of the little wooden triangle coop that used to be my playhouse.
My Father's Only Recipe
| July 26, 2021 First, take pork spare ribs. Hack them up with an impossibly large cleaver into bite-sized pieces. Rub them with a proprietary mix of star anise, black beans, garlic, soy sauce, hoisin sauce, ginger, and secrets. Never ask him what happened in Taiwan, or why his mother never spoke the name of her former husband again.
Name
| July 19, 2021 I've recently dedicated myself to learning the names of trees. Before I never thought it made much of a difference, but the beauty of their names compelled me.
Morning
| July 12, 2021 When my infant daughter wakes at two in the morning and her father cannot coax her back to sleep, she and I curl up on the mattress in the guest room below the big window, and I drift off with her tiny fingers gripping my thumb.
Carrot
| July 5, 2021 Tonight I peeled and chopped carrots for dinner, tossed them with oil and thyme, oven-roasted them. The simpler the ingredient, the more miraculous it seems to me.
The Last To Turn In
| June 28, 2021 Everyone went to sleep, except my cousin and me. I lingered a bit, my own children upstairs, sprawled across air mattresses, or burrowed in rented cribs. He wanted to stay awake, to party. Or at least have a companion to watch It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia.
The Extinction Museum: Exhibit #207 (Glass Coke Bottle—Labeled “Helium”)
| June 21, 2021 Parties were for destroying. You hit the patient hero with a stick until he broke open to rain down candy. Every wall was filled with pinholes and sword dents. In the backyard, your friends tore up the grass in handfuls, sundering unwary worms, leaving gouges to slip on after rain.
Ceremony
| June 14, 2021 She dances beside the highway each morning. You're driving your son to school, in thick traffic with lights to make, when you notice her across a stretch of construction and broken streets. Bearing marks of itinerancy and sleeping rough, she reaches the center of an empty lot, and it begins: a dancer’s poise with sure cadence and confident, inevitable steps.
Reclamation
| June 7, 2021 The Army Corp of Engineers lowered the water level of the Mississippi River below St. Anthony Falls so they could inspect the locks. My wife took the kids down there at my suggestion. Children frolicked in areas where, in any other circumstance, they would surely drown.
Notes to My Father
| May 31, 2021 On most surfaces in my house, you'll find short notes I've written for my father. I flip the phone's camera on FaceTime so he can read them when he can't hear me. He mouths them slowly out loud: Be good and obey nurses. Put hearing aids in ears. Today is Jacob’s birthday. Stay awake in daylight and sleep in the dark. Change into clean clothes or God won’t take you to heaven. Call after dinner. I love you.
Command
| May 24, 2021 It's nearing Easter, 2020. My lover, David, and I watch The Ten Commandments with Charlton Heston. We break it up across three days, one hour per day. I always associated Heston with the NRA, with white old man gun-toting Uhmerca toxic masculinity, but the more I watch, the more Moses’s shoulders and thighs seem to flex, seem to bulge out of the screen, oiled.
The Drive Home
| May 17, 2021 We pulled out of the driveway. Our destination: Newark International Airport for a pre-dawn flight back to Seattle. My father drove his Ford Taurus just below the speed limit. Staring out the window, I thought of all the times we'd travelled this road together before.
Reading
| May 10, 2021 I am reading. I have spun into the writer's words, how his grandmother curled and uncurled the telephone cord around her fingers. I remember those curly cords, how the coils unspooled when you walked around, and then jumped back, spiraling in on themselves, hanging like a wonky rubber ringlet.
On the Afternoon I Write My Husband Another Note
| May 3, 2021 I sit in my gray office and scribble words onto a piece of stationary I wish I could remember picking out, yellow flowers wrapping around the edges. Believe me when I say I do not have a choice. And I am so sorry. And I tried to fix myself.
Not That Kind of Royalty
| April 26, 2021 “So, you lost your crown,” the dentist says. “Yes,” I reply. “Down the hatch.” I’ve learned that jokes are the best and maybe only antidote to terror. My daughter often reminds me, “Don’t relive past traumas,” so I won’t describe the horror show of dental malfeasance that got me here. Not to the dentist’s chair—that’s simple: I swallowed a crown while eating a bowl of leftover rice. Here being: imploding dread, the body’s memory of pain.
Resonance
| April 19, 2021 A fifty-something woman, wearing a faded floral dress, showed me the antique pump organ. “No one plays anymore,” she said, her wooden cooking spoon in hand. “And I could use the $150.” She went back to her farmhouse stove to stir a pot that smelled of onion and sage while my new husband and I—some said too young for marriage at only 22—whispered about the price.
Urn
| April 12, 2021 “What kind of urn do you have in mind?” “No need,” I tell the funeral director. “My mother was a potter.” In the brownstone where I grew up, mother stashed a potter’s wheel behind a Japanese screen built by my father. When she wasn’t throwing pots, I rode that wheel like a merry-go-round.
Seasonal
| April 5, 2021 In the fall, we rake pecans into piles as most people do with leaves. The tree’s branches extend in every direction over our backyard. Summer thunderstorms shake them loose unripened and encased in a rubbery green skin. They hit the roof with a sharp block, a Louisiana hail.
Mist
| March 29, 2021 A wisp of perfume accompanied my mother. Like her, it was elegant and subtle. The fragrance softly followed her up the hall, her heels clicking, her skirt rustling. Late to somewhere.
