Author: Why Are You Yelling?
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In Common
In Common My father dove through the sky 19 times— once while I watched. No more than four, I only remember his last ten feet and then ground, the parachute like a dress around him. Now, on a drive up to Sacandaga Lake: a diver swimming down toward the trees, lazily falling like a belated…
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The 1989 Production of WTWTA
Did I ever tell you guys the story of when I was in a stage production of Where the Wild Things Are? That’s how I know it will be a good movie, because it was so brilliant on stage. My Broadway (St. Paul the Apostle auditorium) debut:
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New Year
On the night of the party, looking out from the 8th floor, someone asked, Do you feel you’ve made it? Do you look at all this and know you’ve made it? The inside of me said, No, said, Where? (The inside, like bluish tar, talks fastest, longest.) After, when I hadn’t left the apartment in a week,…
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Making a Pillowcase from the Upholstery
You can’t go home again and all that stuff. An essay about getting rid of the childhood possessions that weighed me down.
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When It Gets This Hot
Within days of my mom dying, Mike and I were moved into the already-cramped three bedroom house which was currently holding four people. Mike occupied the basement while I lived in the sun room (with enough room for a twin bed, small TV, and bed stand)—the former computer room which was a go-between space connecting…
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In Preparation
When we walk at night with the ghosts of New York, we float above grates and glass; we have hit our heads on concrete before— we have jumped from buildings, sank. We spent a year wrapped in blankets, emerged drunk, slightly shrunken; we had films for expression, books for quotations, but no banners for our…
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May Flowers
I took the W on my way downtown to Battery Park and a homeless man was cleaning himself methodically in the seats diagonal to mine. Take off shoe, take off sock, wipe, clean. Somewhere around City Hall, he took out an air freshener and sprayed the air above, around, and underneath him, and I thought,…
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Weather Channel
Your back turned, a broken compassvibrating faulty,stays shadowed despitethe moonlight-in-the-window. The ghosts living betweenour clothes, the dinner talksof porch lights.The apple-picking offorgotten thought,and allotted time fortouching fingers.I keep my front to your back,my knees closed, jointly pointing. The rain stays south,but not forever. Findwest-bound with your compass.Walk there gently,new figure in the window.I will never…
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10 Years
Sitting in a tub, behind the curtain, with fingers lightly thumping porcelain: after thirty-three hours of praying, she came down from the ceiling. It’s the big blue chair that my mother loved, with upholstery maintained and bottom scuffs, that followed me to Brooklyn. Massive, it didn’t come apart in the middle like lounges made after…
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In Rockefeller
I can’t see the ground around me justumbrellas overlapping in the raineverywhere as people stand.(I don’t own one—with which to overlap or to be overlapped.The wet always comes in anyway.Not with two?But, surely, the wind…) The rain falls in sheetslike summer lined-laundryand I can only think of ruinedpicnics; Cental Park certainly deserted—sinking ground, soaked benches.The…
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