Variations on a Theme

The author and her mother Outside my window in the August heat, the highway blurs by, liquid. As CDs rotate through the player, I’m suddenly alert at the first strains…

July, 1967: I am twenty-four years old; my brother is twenty-six. My wife and I are spending a week in California, a break in the intensity of my last year…

drawing by Debra Galant * two poems by Heather Newman * SING-ALONG I’m invited to drink and sing around the piano. I’m that standby you call when you need a…

The author’s senior photo   The first thing you need to know about Danny is that Danny wasn’t punk. I mean, Danny wanted to be punk. Danny wanted to be…

Sometimes he wakes up screaming in the middle of the night. Not particularly hungry, sometimes not even wet or poopy. I can identify the times when there is nothing obviously…

Before the Great Disruption, I wrote in coffeeshops; coffeeshops, bars, bookstores, sometimes the park. The noise and activity around me seemed to occupy the wandering part of my mind and…

I feel like there’s something you need me to say. As if you’ve been waiting years to hear the words only I can speak. Or, maybe this specific combination of…

Fall semester junior year, I lived in a six-man, four-bedroom dorm suite and every Tuesday and Thursday at 3:15, Diggity and I returned home at the same time. I’d need…

image: Radiation by Rhonda Fishman * Freddy had wired a radio in the bathroom so that whenever Freddy turned on the light, he had music. He stood in front of…

In 1990, when Halley’s comet was 1.2 billion miles from the sun, an eight-year-old boy heard a song called “Halley Came to Jackson” on a new CD on his parents’…

In the summer of 2012, I quit my office job and spent a month and a half on a solo cross-country road trip moving from Pittsburgh to San Francisco. It…

Anne and I were standing on the mezzanine at the San Francisco Symphony admiring the veranda of the cityscape and trying our best to acclimate to the setting. I was…

I’ve tried to tell the story of Kristin a thousand times. She’s been a dream, she’s been a poem, she’s been a sigh after a long breakdown of tears, she’s…

two poems by Matthew Lippman * WHAT THE HITS MAKE YOU DO When the sun came up over the clouds I turned up “Rich Girl.” It wasn’t the sun or…