On the face of it, it wouldn’t seem to be a match. Beat writers and military cadets. But Gordon Ball, Allen Ginsburg’s farm manager, taught Beat Generation writers to cadets at Virginia Military Institute for 26 […]

First Dog: A Love Song
 
You didn’t even want it. You said it was much too nervous,
inappropriate for us who had never owned a dog,
and wrong for our cold climate. It would have to wear a sweater,
we would be […]

For as long as I can remember, I’ve enjoyed being a creative person. I’ve occasionally been labeled “artsy-fartsy” or some similarly dismissive phrase. And I’ve struck back and used my own pejorative, the phrase […]

Reno and Smiley in Verona
 
Walking not far from Juliet’s graffitied house,
a window gives its music to the alley below—
Appalachian spring tripping on love.
I hear I Wouldn’t Change You if I Could. […]

Thirteen is a hellish year. I don’t understand why evolution didn’t just let us skip from twelve straight to fourteen. Twelve is really cool. You’re a sixth grader in grammar school (as they called it when I was a […]

The first fan fiction I ever wrote was inspired by Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the television series created by Joss Whedon about a blonde superhero who turns the tables by killing vampires instead of being killed […]

From Ice and Dust
 
All summer long, a comet
streaks, star blown and cold,
as I walk, hollow boned
thin ribbed, a scarecrow loosed

upon the night, trailing cotton.
How elastic the hands once,
thick with […]

Apparently, during the fifteen or so minutes while my husband and daughter waited in the car outside Whole Foods, some man had knifed his ex-wife. The injury doesn’t seem serious; she’s slouched in the rea […]

My selected photographs belong to two different periods and locations but stem from similar motivations. They are studies, each leading to the next image, knowing that images birth one another. They are all […]

Ten years after my second divorce and one year sober, dreaming of companionable days and zooming up to a net worth of zero, Charlie asked me to marry him and I said yes.

It was an act of reckless selfishness. I […]

Somewhere in Arizona
 
dusk swallowed the day
we spent in gold-red dirt
tracing rocks with unsteady feet
where each thin-air breath
seemed as tentative as tomorrow.

So we slowed our pace, you and I,
we […]

In my own personal experience, art, poetry especially, has always been political, has always been protest, rooted in my own mixed ethnic and poverty-class background.

It rose from my father’s Irishness—Dad r […]

The Workers of Macchu Picchu
—After Neruda
Like corn, the mortals were husked in the bottomless
granary of forgotten deeds, miserable events,
from one o’clock to seven, to eight,
and not one but many dea […]

Dear Dhriti,

You’re 4 months old now and have learned how to lie on your stomach and roll over again. You’re reaching for teethers and toys, your mom proudly declares when I badger her for baby deet […]

[the roots have risen up away from the trunk]
 
i told my children the roots have risen up away from the trunk and like your brain seeps the tree’s structure seeps as well and searches and keeps searching ev […]

Late on a warm summer night in 1979, my housemate Lenny and I were shooting the breeze at the kitchen table when we heard a long squeal, followed by some loud bangs, interspersed with another squeal and, finally, […]

“To me photography is a blend of serendipity, of good fortune and conscious selection and structuring. I need to apply skill and I need to get lucky,” says Charlottesville photographer Will Kerner. “The […]

The old woman fills her days volunteering for a Catholic garden club planting flowers in vacant lots on the town’s east side, where at night gangs shoot it out amid trampled pansies and broken-off cosmos. She g […]

In the Valley of the Bones
The hand of HASHEM was upon me; it took me out by the spirit of HASHEM and set me down in the midst of the valley—and it was filled with bones…He said to me, “Prophesy over these bon […]

Life doesn’t come with an instruction manual. We are not handed a guide at birth entitled Fail-proof Steps to Living This Life. As such, I’ve lived most of my life through a lot of trial and error—heavy on the er […]