family
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Round Trip
Thinking my grandfather was from here deepened my experience of Plovdiv. I felt closer to the city, to the people, and to my own family.
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Osiris
My Korean mother leaves me on a fall day in the 1980s. I don’t know the year, only that it is cold, and she—who peels red apples in one unbroken skin, massages my calves when they’ve fallen asleep from sitting…
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Consider the Bird
I remember the night he told me about the white bird there was a Styrofoam cup with a bendable straw and water in one hand, and a Bayer pill in a medicine cup.
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The Ghosts in Our Blood
The medium sat down on the twenty-year old loveseat in my living room. She settled in like an old friend, without looking around, without working to read the weight of my eyelids, the twitch of my mouth.
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Get Me Away From Here, I’m Dying
No one comes in to check on me, no one asks if I’m okay after I finally emerge, embarrassed, my eyes completely red. They all love me, but not enough to forgive what I’m about to do.
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Albums of Our Lives: Tori Amos’s Strange Little Girls and Little Earthquakes
I was fourteen when Strange Little Girls was released and I was fifteen when my parents decided to separate.
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The Disciples of Memory
When I was eleven years old, my father enrolled me in a memory improvement course at the local community college.
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A Memorandum of Ghosts
Outside my window in Chicago it is snowing. I am overlooking a back yard that looks like a New England forest. Pine trees and garden bridges, amber soil and dirty snow. Snow that only looks that way after a January…
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My Little Brother Ruined My Life
“Are you a masochist?” It’s the first thing Bosco asks me. He’s fourteen years old now, almost my height, 5′ 8″, creamy white skin, and a small, German nose from my stepmother’s side of the family.
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When Barbara Jean Was Missing
“You are the closest thing I have to a mother,” she said. My mother said this to me, her oldest daughter, me, the only one of her four children unlikely to give her grandchildren. I am forty. I am single.…
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The Rumpus Original Combo with Justin Torres
Justin Torres has had a lot of jobs. He worked on a farm. He walked dogs. He drove a truck, picking up donations around New England. He even had a stint at Brainwash, folding laundry. Thankfully, along the way he…
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Suppose I Kept on Singing Love Songs Just to Break My Own Fall
I don’t remember what I was doing when my aunt called to tell me my father was dying.