My son leans into me, his hot body a hot brick against mine.
My son leans into me, his hot body a hot brick against mine.
I inhaled sharply as the surgeon entered the room.
He's not doing great, but at ninety-one he's had an adventurous life.
I can’t see the needles jabbing the side of my neck, my periphery shielded by a crinkly paper sheet.
Abuela brings the pot out from her mobile home. It’s heavy with the weight of the seed pods from the ebony tree on our lot.
The summer my teacher didn’t kiss me was set to a soundtrack of show tunes and The Shins, the whisper of smoke in my ears as he taught me how to breathe it.
Scrambling out of bed I race down the hallway, bare feet slapping on the boards.
My almost-two-year-old doesn’t talk. “It’s not worrisome yet,” the doctor says.
Standing between her mother’s legs, I cradled this tiny baby, still floating in her sac.
Recognizing the customer as a classmate’s father, I welcome him more amicably than I otherwise might.
“Daddy’s home!” I cheered as I skipped along the deck of our pool to give him a hug.
Vertical swirls of hot steam emanated from bubbles of water.
A friend of mine told me about “The Spitting Lady,” an elderly woman who haunts Manhattan’s East Side by screaming at and spitting on pedestrians.
It’s evening rush and a strapping young man boards my train, takes a seat for people with disabilities.
My grandmother doesn’t get mental health issues.
Bundled against the cold, we walk along the abandoned canal. A runner passes close by and coughs the plague on me.
My sons perch like twin birds on the edge of the tub, watching me pee.
The wasp buzzed in the winter window. How did it get in?
I gasp at the touch of the stethoscope, then close my eyes and think of the beach . . .
Gerry walked me home, though my apartment was a two-minute walk from theirs; it was three in the morning and we’d been drinking.