The tree frog plays his violin.

There was still nailpolish on her toes and fingers.

“You’re crafty and wise,” the quiz’s benevolent gods tell me.

Tortellini becomes my password for everything.

It’s Saturday night, and I am cleaning the kitchen because it’s easier than cleaning up my life; I am putting away dishes because I know where dishes go. I do not know where to put other things:

What do you get when you mix and elephant with a rhino?

Elephino.

That joke has always held a special place with me. I first heard it back in prime time when the American Broadcasting Company

“You are cursed,” my Dida said, solidifying the bells of mortality that were ringing.
“Ki?” I responded, my eyes wide with fear and panic.
“There is a beauty mark here inside you. It means you are cursed with sexiness.”

I made eye contact, made the purchase, stored it between other magazines on my bookshelf.

On the street, the music thundered from an unseen source, day and night – but it was, oddly, only audible from the sidewalk. Once ensconced inside our house, we forgot about it, as we neglected so many external things during medical school.

These days writers are obsessed with themselves and once upon a time they were exactly the same way, obsessed with themselves. Once upon a time, there was a man who worked at the Strand and his name

A spoonful of vanilla ice cream crosses oceans of history. Hold that dollop on the back of your tongue.  Consider.

Today, nothing could be whiter than vanilla ice cream.  Vanilla means white.  It

“God is good!” my uncle Albert chanted, and his congregation agreed in full force.

YES! AMEN! YES GOD, AMEN!

“God is willing to heal you of all that hurts you, my children. All he asks for is

At eighteen I got two stars tattooed on my ankle. I used to tell people a variety of stories: they were falling stars, they were the stars from Peter Pan, they were the North Star and its unnamed

What I've written here is, of course, something that Kurt Cobain will never know. On April 8, the discovery of his suicide was 24 years ago in history. That's almost a quarter of a century, and I

This wasn’t supposed to be an essay.

I became obsessed with the idea of bunting. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I wanted to make my own.

After I turned thirty-five, the age of forty circled me like a shark. My dread of it intensified with each passing year. On my thirty-eighth birthday, I braced myself. The movement in the water had

Ironically, hours before we went to see Whoopi, I texted two friends from my bathtub that I didn’t think I would ever write another essay. It was “too hard.” “People only want to vilify you, so they look for words to use to that end, and ignore the rest of what you’ve said.”

Jack Daniel screams his way down my throat & it’s a dry thrust.

Now I’m not dating anymore and I use the gold duffel bag to haul my belongings from one house-sitting gig to the next.

At first, it seemed like a poet’s dream day job. A job of watching, then describing.

“Bit ‘im in the jugular,” the truck driver tells me about the bear ten feet away, describing the day the bear went crazy.

The morning of our second date I drew a card – now I can’t remember which one...

It’s someone’s job to bury the dead.

On my last night in Zhenjiang, the three other laowai and I—each of us western foreigners: three upstaters and a guy from Toronto—walk the condominium-lined miles out to the banks of the Yangtze river.