Mother

At some point, I realize that I’m dreaming. I move through darkness to a precipice where falling water splits into ribbons of warblers and starlings and I land in a…

Mom’s Walmart name tag hung around her neck from a faded lanyard and her dark curls fell around her face like an overgrown garden. I stared at her over the…

Image Credit: The author and his sister Kori, Halloween 1969   My mother, Dear Sugar, a troll named Gladiator, Mildred Pierce, and Dustin Hoffman all converge at the same time,…

Image Credit: Photo courtesy of the author’s mother content warning: discussions of rape and consent   One day in 1983, when my mother was a Brown University sophomore, her roommate…

Image Credit: Lee Seung Ho The cure for anything is salt water: sweat, tears, or the sea. -Isak Dinesan   Mama is a jomnyeo. Her breath is her livelihood. She…

Image Credit: Tom Cowton. Fuchsia bush growing in Torres del Paine National Park, Chile circa 2004.  I was 13 the first time my mother threatened to kick me out of…

My mom was admitted to St. John’s Hospital on Wednesday, April 29, with fatigue, shortness of breath, fever, and confusion. Upon arrival, she tested positive for COVID-19. Three days later,…

One spring afternoon in 1992, my mother and I went to the pet store to buy birdseed and walked out with four baby chicks. Whenever our family acquired a new…

“Don’t say mourning. It’s too analytical. I’m suffering.”                         —Roland Barthes, from a journal kept after his mother’s death…

Ma, it’s been a while since we’ve talked, really talked. I’m not sure of the last time we had a conversation that we both wanted to be in, of the…

I scrawl snippets of my life onto scraps of paper and tuck them between the covers of my unwritten books. How will I spin these muddled bits of memory into…

I wouldn’t walk away from my mother’s dead body. After my sisters and I had washed her breasts, belly, arms, and smoothed scented cream over her soft, soft papery skin,…

Under the scratchy polyester quilt in our rented trailer I listened to the volley of insults grow thick and loud on the other side of the wall. Cabinet doors slammed,…

If you run my mother’s name through a search engine, the third or fourth spot down is an article about something good she may have done. After that it’s all…