Lauren walked around the bed, took her chair, flopped an arm on her daughter’s bed and leaned toward her. “I thought your dad was a jock, okay? For whatever reason. He was on a scholarship and I just assumed it was a baseball scholarship. He had that kind of look, that’s what I thought right […]
The poetry reading had been going well. This annual Philly event drew a sizable crowd, but this year—for unexplained reasons—the hall was jammed. Crammed in the third row, at the break I stood to stretch and look around. McQuitty, one of our greatest local poets, was sitting at the end of the last row. I […]
both how wrong the aloneness of my Father’s body, slumped in the reverberant too-small bath. and Mother, cupping His head, mapped with violent-violet scans, explorations of hope, reduced, a crown of purple thorns, a porcelain throne, draped in linen terrycloth. damn God! he’s unskinned, out of his shell of Fatherness, adrift, washed into the sea, […]
Lauren Hoffman walked into her daughter’s room, dragged a chair next to the bed, dropped her purse beside the chair and sat. Vanessa was lying on her side, pillows at her back, a pillow between her calves, two under her neck and head. Her hands were under the covers and the covers were pulled up […]