Essays
Honeypot
You can have years in a life when
the seeds of new beginnings are matched by acres of adjacent crops
that have simply vanished from the face of the earth. Green shoots in
the breeze on one side; ghost stalks in the wind on the other. My
2016 was like that. With winter solstice upon us, I’ve been trying
to locate what remains in the wake of such vanishing.
Mama in the Dark
When
you have a baby, you spend a lot of time in the dark. Everyone talks
about the light, and the infusion of joy. Thankfully, I’ve had
those in abundance too. From the first touch I’ve been looped into
a seemingly limitless circuit of buoyancy, my body saturated with
delight every time I make contact with my daughter. It has been the
first effortless thing in my entire life.
Salespath
And if longing seizes you for sailing the stormy seas,
when the Pleiades flee mighty Orion
and plunge into the misty deep
and all the gusty winds are raging,
then do not keep your ship on the wine-dark sea
but, as I bid you, remember to work the land.
Hesiod, Works and Days
A sale is a transference of feeling and energy.
Car sales training manual (paraphrase of Zig Ziglar)
The Great Unknowing
Published in The Threepenny Review, September 2020
“…woman is her body as man is his,
but her body is something other than her.”
Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex
That spring I walked into the hospital for a minor procedure and walked out with a handful of balloons into the strangest six weeks of my life. At forty-four I thought I knew the contours of the possible.