Blog : Beautiful-Things
Two Degrees

I had to look it up in my old physics notebook, exhumed from its tomb of an ancient cedar chest and kept all these years as a talisman for time travel that the Internet could never touch.
Dinner Talk

The asparagus grew in the Sicilian garden, and my mother made frittata that was sometimes lunch, sometimes dinner, sometimes snack...
This Is It

1998. We stole it at night, one of us running across a lawn we had scoped out beforehand. With a firm kick, I popped it out neatly and ran away with it under my arm like a football, never really breaking my stride. The runaway car was there, waiting...
Shame and Drum

In the Midwestern auditorium, a tired Richard Ford reads a fiction about Grand Central Station to a ticketed crowd as tired and sparse as his scalp. He is old and disappointed, and he is reading about old disappointment...
What Matters

Thursday is "Cosmic Night" at the space centre. I am waiting for three friends by the giant crab outside. The late George Norris designed the twenty-foot sculpture. Stainless steel pincers grasp for the sky.
Yield

Waiting at a red light after dropping off videos. I've nosed my car onto the cross walk, hoping it will trigger the light to change more quickly...
YES

Anthony’s text just says, “YES.” I’ve decided to change my flight to Boston, to move it up five days. He’s floundering, just doesn’t sound right; the 25th could be too late. Sooner. Have to get there sooner...
Kinetic Energy

Weeks after California first legalized queer marriages but before the voters snatched them away in 2008, my girlfriend introduced me to the dyke march...
Saturday Night

Every day I flash on scenes and sounds of Fallujah. There are ways of grounding them...
Kerria

“Cheerful!” she said, “What is it?” Then recognizing the compact rows of marigold trophies lining spray upon spray arcing over the yard, “Oh, kerria, that was my mother’s favorite.” A moment of silence for one mother’s mother gone twenty years...
Bottled Memories

Golden jars glisten. Forty-nine quarts of autumn ripeness and summer’s bronze made sweet by the kiss of blizzards to come. Like a mother waiting for the reassuring cry of her newborn, I pine for the pop of jars sealing...
A Dress for the Wedding

You are modeling dresses and your husband votes for the one with the bouncy hem and V-neck. "It shows your nice cleavage!" "Yeah, for everyone." But in fact, you like your cleavage, and it's good to like something about your body...
The Boarding School Letters

But consider for example the six-year-old daughter, face down on her new dorm bed, who cannot possibly imagine what to write to her mother a thousand miles away...
Holding Hands

We walk up the stairway of my grandmother's porch. Towers of brick flank the stairs, which later we will scramble up to leap into the soft green grass below...
Dead Man Tim

Tim's apartment was cleaned and all his belongings put out on a curb in the parking lot. This is the saddest part...
Yes, They've Met

There's a 1/16 scale Texaco truck parked on our mantle, its frame crooked and stack bent from ways it's been stored. I dust it. Then, I dust my son's toolbox, an eighth-grade shop project etched with the name he's inherited from good stock. My husband's grandfather drove a Texaco truck...
Ice

I'm nine months pregnant with my first child, and the snow in NYC has been beaten into submission. I've just come off a packed subway...
Seattle, After the Rain

To the birds, we must look like ants at a picnic, the way we crawl from our dark caves and run crazed for sidewalks and grassy parks...
This is Where You'll Find Me

New York City, after we lied then made rules. It shouldn't work by a long shot but it does....
Lines of Light

At sunset in Burlington the power lines are golden like the afterglow of sparklers when children twirl them in the air. A frayed ribbon of sunlight stretches out...
What We Did with the Honey

The day we learned you were gone, Howie says he knocked, nothing answered.
Parabolic

His first summer married, my father tended chickens. His job was to chase the birds out of the tin coop on hot days...
Morning (repeat)

When my infant daughter wakes at two in the morning and her father cannot coax her back to sleep...
The Day to Day

Sifting the flour. Squeezing the lever once. And then waiting. For a moment, it is winter again. I take my finger and make snow angels in the little blue bowl. After you died, they said the only thing to do was keep on living...
The Day to Day

Sifting the flour. Squeezing the lever once. And then waiting. For a moment, it is winter again. I take my finger and make snow angels in the little blue bowl.Â
White (repeat)

We no longer remember the sound of birdsong or the feel of dry pavement beneath our feet, but we walk to school anyway because school is the place we're meant to walk to on Tuesday mornings. Temperatures register -23 below zero...
Grace (repeat)

"Thank you," I tell the manager, "for taking my order so late." The sizzle of the grill frames my words. "I appreciate it."
Holding (repeat)

My sister and I live on either side of sixty. We've been mothers half our lives. Visiting her in Oregon, Ashland running a steady hundred degrees for days into weeks, we head to Lake of the Woods...
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