When I think about my dream of living in a farmhouse in a Mediterranean countryside, with old olive trees outside, and a white dog running around the dusty place, my groceries arriving via a delivery driver on a white Vespa, her rounded smile as mature as the sunrise used to rising above a sea that’s …
Instigating
As per usual, the summer heat wave and I do our best to put up with one another, giving each other the much-needed space we require sweating through the swollen furniture of embraced pain. I sit next to the air conditioner in my bedroom and watch television until my breathing slows and I can feel …
The Friend Display
My therapist says I remind others of what they want and believe they can’t have, so they deny my true self, in other words, my existence, to avoid feeling insecure and nonexistent themselves, and I tell her maybe I’m just an acquired taste, but that she’s right, maybe with my generous work/life balance, and single, …
Relaxing at Home
during summer break, I remembered my childhood self, sitting in the car of one of my girlfriends, and me listening to her explain how she was hurt by an ex who treated her like a child, and made her do things she didn’t want to do. Then, while thinking maybe if I thought hard enough …
You’re Used
The kind of love you know you need you don’t see in the world, not even when you’re not searching. All there is to do is imagine love, or try to love God, or some other object of belief representing all the ways you’ve neglected yourself. What is touch? The last time you felt it …
Paraprofessional Tonglen
In the Buddhist practice of Tonglen, translated as “giving and taking,” the meditator replaces himself with others, real or imagined, by first identifying others and himself as Buddha, then breathing in suffering, with the intention of transmuting it into all the good things he wants for himself, which he’ll next give to his community on …
I’m Trying to Stop These Kids
I’m trying to stop these kids from killing each other in their backwards way of proving to themselves they are not worthy of love, trying to stop them from stealing each other’s food they think should have been theirs, from walking off grounds to practice running away from home, from playing baseball next to first-floor …
Fifty
Turning fifty makes me long for my twenties again, for when I was fit and beautiful, and the world seemed like it was mine, meant for only me to discover. I’d lean against the wall with one foot up outside cafes, and smoke, with a nicotine-fuming smile that said I’ve been under hell, and made …
The Wives’ Club
In class, a 6th grader asks loud enough for the hallway to hear do I have a wife, and I tell her I don’t have one of those, but that I used to. What happened? she asks and I tell her divorce. Oh, she says. She doesn’t ask how are you today Mr. Russell? or …
I Want Boredom to Feel Like a Trip
I guess I put intimacy before frivolity. I’ve always been like that. There’s this picture of my grandparents holding me in their backyard by the blueberry bushes when I was like 1, and they are the happiest people on Earth, and the look on my baby face resembles that of a judge having just heard …
Two Lives
No matter how quiet I was, I could never shut up inside. I liked being stoic, and waiting patiently for the right words to build up and blow off the top of my imagination, but like a teenager who won’t zip it and has to spout off about every little thing, spuming stream of consciousness …
I Can Find a Blanket’s Worth
I was going to say that one of the things I find most interesting is how the harder you hold onto things, the more swiftly they escape you, you know, something paradoxical and playful like that. But then I remembered I can find a blanket’s worth of comfort in a bucket-full of artery-hardening cheese, can …
Trout Father
My father was a trout, or maybe I’d just like him to be like one, and it’s me who’s the trout. During the summers we’d drive around Concord to some of his favorite creeks, many of which, today, have been either built over or dried up. It was all about the trout with my father. …
I Liked Being
The mythological death daemon rising from my consciousness and laughing maniacally, the way my father did in his sleep some nights I also couldn’t sleep because I heard a creature at the foot of my bed breathing as if to say your life is mine when I say it is, stands at the crosswalk, waiting …
Depression
reminds me of the time I ran away from home, when I was seven, and how, sitting on some nearby train tracks and staring down them, the birch and maple on either side of them seemed to grow as silent and pensive as I felt about my mother’s condition, which seemed to arise out of …
Brave
I used to worry about the fact that, because I chose not to drive, and by the time I was 35 everyone in my immediate family had either died, moved on, or been tactfully estranged for safety reasons, almost everyone my age I knew, or could know, who was trying to build and take care …
Images
The brain was having difficulty managing all the input and was in danger of exploding. “Slow down the images,” the doctor said. The assistant fiddled with the dials and said, “They’ve been slowed to one image per second.” “Mr. Stan, I’m going to need you to increase retrieval speed to three memories per second,” the …
The Sitter
I’d awoken in an unfamiliar room with a woman sitting on my lap, and I didn’t want to know who or why. It felt so good to be pressed into the chair and to feel a soft weight on top of me. What to do? I looked up to see the most beautiful woman I’ve …
The Visit
“I was drinking my coffee,” Ralph said. I’d stopped by to see my friend. The books from his bookcase were all over the coffee table in irregular piles. I immediately began putting them back. “I was sleeping last night, so I didn’t get your text,” I said. “When a meteor fell out back, and an …
Comatose
Often, in the morning before work, I’ll sit in my chair, and a part of me will start to feel like it’s fading away. I can feel a kind of comatose coming on, and I worry I’ll either bite my tongue off in a seizure-like middle place between sleep and waking, or just straight out …
My Poety Place 
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