Uttering a word is like striking a note on the keyboard of the imagination. — Ludwig Wittgenstein In the early 1980s I went to the Third Annual Conference on Computers and Writing. A well-known computer guru—can his name really have been Chip?—was the keynote speaker. Against expectation, he told us that across town they were …
Bones. Decapitations. The tip of the knife running down my jugular vein as if de-veining a shrimp. Bones, my bones, delicate as the spines of feathers, taped to paper, hung in old musty museums. The decapitation of my beloved, his face like that of an elephant gouged of its tusk, my fingers dabbing the blood …
The floor is exploding and I’m on it, hiding beneath my writing desk. Scraps of brain scattered everywhere, chunks of meat for vultures. The sunlight is scared, also hiding, everyone is hiding, terrified by my terror. I’m screaming really loud, the dog is barking also really loud. Screaming like an animal whose throat has been …
This week, the district is doing everything it forgot. For example, every school is to average six fire drills per academic year. Which someone forgot. We’ve had five fire drills in two days, including two back-to-back in one period. Most of the teachers aren’t angry. We’re dissociative. It’s Wednesday and first period my kids had …
I did not realize how often I had seen the parking sign for disabled people in America until I started driving around to look for a parking space. On a busy day, it’s not easy to find a parking space near my local library. Cars are parked back to back on the street and side …
The house I grew up in was a blue aquarium, my mother and father, the tanked up animals, and I was a child of the hinterlands where winter was always howling like a pack of hungry wolves. A baby veteran, I was always under siege, the attacks brutal and my screams from being beaten or …
I painted my first Emily Dickinson in 1992, probably as a kind of totem. I had spent my early childhood living in a cottage my parents rented on the property of a defunct artist’s colony in the hills outside Honolulu. Founded by artists Lillie Gay and George Burroughs Torrey after they eloped (with some scandal …
I never saw Saigon. In 1970, I was stationed at Camp Radcliff next to the village of An Khe in the Central Highlands. I was assigned to the army’s 4th Infantry Division. The 4th lived way north of Saigon. But in March of 1975, a month before The Fall Of Saigon, I lived in Dallas …