2014 Category
I Used to Be a Special Needs Mommy
Posted on March 26, 2014 Leave a Comment
One of the smartest people I know – now a judge, but first a mother – once told me that you’re only as happy as your least happy child. She told me this when I myself was a new mother of less than a few months, waist high in dirty diapers, developmentally-appropriate crib toys, empty […]
Factory of the Elite
Posted on March 25, 2014 Leave a Comment
Fatal lip gloss girls pucker self-conscious memories in a deep twisted taste of twinkling blush. Sinking that tooth in my bottom lip, fighting those tears of exhausting expectations harbored for mere mortals like myself, in the hollow trench sloshes astringent acceptance of standards inhumanely high -too high indeed- even unattainable, for the awkward and ill […]
Wisdom
Posted on March 24, 2014 2 Comments
Le Terrace Club was a private pool where I spent a bunch of summers growing up. For those of you who are wondering, yes, it’s THAT Le Terrace Club. I mention the true name only because I’m not going to hide the fact that we were members, and it’s relevant to the extent that it […]
Nonna
Posted on March 21, 2014 9 Comments
After The Edge of Night, but before Mike Douglas – the black and white snowy antenna leans sideways out the sunlit kitchen window, trailing dust motes above the sink – the lunch dishes are almost dried. Your grainy skin, with its lost turgor, its ropy, blue-green veins – our family tree traced lovingly on the […]
Sunday for Spite
Posted on March 21, 2014 Leave a Comment
In that half turn from Oraton onto Chester, a boat and a stove kiss in the morning mist off the Passaic, crunchy brownish weeds vying to separate them – bland tang of a sticky communion wafer clinging to my tongue. I run it over my teeth, and look out the back of the Oldsmobile -the […]
Rula
Posted on March 19, 2014 Leave a Comment
Don’t look at me with your how-did-that-happen face, all feathered fake, mocked and melted – reflecting futile damp looks through synthetic and tangled lengths. It’s your hunched shoulders, rounded to knees bent covered, misshapen and strained, that give away your terror; but it’s the waning tremor, retreating dark and raspy – later balanced gingerly, gently […]
Morning Train
Posted on March 19, 2014 Leave a Comment
When I awake with my usual bloody lip salted and curdled in a mutinous fugue of fatigue, only then is every next day of manic perception ushered in. Another day ahead -I pray only for blackness- for to be defined by the monotony of progression is to be emotionally waterboarded. It’s an erratic regimen, erotic […]
The Touchstone
Posted on March 18, 2014 Leave a Comment
In the kitchen we sat on Sunday mornings, toes tipping icy metal-legged chairs, radio balanced atop the Frigidaire forever playing Benny Goodman’s Goodbye. Of course I could hum that from memory – clarinets and cork, sorrow and bacon breezing out the back door – always naming the songs for sweet-natured amusement. She, too, was made […]
Roller Coasters and Rum Runners
Posted on March 17, 2014 2 Comments
In our house on North 6th Street in Newark, there was a narrow space between my parents’ bed and the wall – better known to me as the Crocodile River. The dark green carpeting only served to enhance the feelings of murk and dread it spawned. That, and the fact that the windows on the […]
Poor Salinger
Posted on March 16, 2014 Leave a Comment
Sun-drenched afternoon (when I was babysitting the snot-nosed genius) raised high my feet on the sun porch’s rocking iron loveseat rusting, to read my franny and zooey or nine stories, and drink my iced tea in a jelly jar glass placed carefully atop the red painted cement floor. The breeze flowed coolly through open jalousies, rippling, little bubbles […]
A Girl by the Bridge 
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