It’s as welcoming as a mother, but none of this was personal. When a tsetse fly – chews your skin with its scissor teeth, through delicate capillaries for the sweet stain of red, it does so completely in earnest. – It ushers in the flagellate protozoan Trypanosoma brucei gambiense. Those misshapen parentheses swim — and they must swim — through...
Nobody wants to live with a corpse … Screaming at the Brooklyn Bridge After Robert Lowell’s “Waking in the Blue” * I weigh one hundred and five pounds after my New York breakfast of vanilla Soylent, all I can keep down these days, thanks to the anti-depressant. I swallow it, beige smoothie, every four to six hours....
The author goes meds-free when the world is having a major depressive episode. “Maybe depression is a normal response to a global pandemic. We don’t really have benchmarks for such an event. If I get down, what can I use to help me bounce back?” * I do not plan to cry. I am lying on...
What to do with what we have ordered. “I said, Fix me.” Amazon Package . I wanted a thing in the shape of a Yom Kippur fast, smelling of hands clasped in anguish. I bought it online. The package slid up and down in various directions . on black belts in one of Amazon’s famous fulfillment centers...
A New Yorker contemplates back-to-school season from the countryside–a mother’s call to arms. “I want to do the right thing. I just don’t know exactly what that is right now.” * I don’t want to go back. As a lifelong New Yorker, I hate to admit that. But it’s true. I’m worried. Worried about what will happen...
