from The Body Papers
One morning in the spring when I was seven years old, I woke up a puffy pink monster. My lips had disappeared into a mass of swollen flesh, my earlobes were triple their usual size, and my cheeks were … Read More
The Blue, an excerpt from Salvage: A Memoir
On the high shelves of my father’s salvage store in Provincetown, I sometimes spotted a glimmer of blue among his dusty collections of clam rakes, lanterns, chains, and anchors; that flash of color always made me feel guilty. When … Read More
My Father’s Teeth
My father saved his teeth by lying through them. Somewhere on the border between Russia and Poland, pines and rifles, in the nineteen-teens, he went off to the woods with two other boys to visit the village horses hidden … Read More
Our Sorrow and Our Love Move into a Foreign Language: Constantine Cavafy, Jacqueline Kahanoff, and Ahmed Rassim
Last October I spent some time on the Greek island of Andros, two hours east by ferry from the mainland. It seemed the right place to re-immerse myself in Cavafy’s poetry, even though Andros, as far as I could … Read More