Creative Nonfiction

I want to light your cigarette. You, the woman who shares her surname with a city romanticized by the likes of Bowie, Iggy Pop, and Lou Reed. Berlin . Wunderbar. I want to light your cigarette even though I've always been deeply allergic to something in cigarettes. Smoking never worked out for me, which knocked off a few cool points in the punk rock circles I ran in. Kids used to pop Vicodin. I popped Zyrtec. While on the subject of punk, let's note your fascination with the

In response to loss we get busy making meaning, recreating what we have lost and reanimating forms of life that might otherwise disappear. This seems to me a wondrous response to love and loss, a wondrous response to caring and finitude in general - Jonathan Lear My father died under the walnut trees, in a year when there were no walnuts. The prior year, there were many: green globes tucked under their canopies of serrated, pinnate leaves. I collected them before they fell,

In Tokyo, there are no trash cans. At least, not in the way I once understood them. I moved here for work, and the first week I arrived, I searched for one the way a child might search for a familiar landmark in a strange city…something to tell me that the world was still operating by the same rules. But I found no bins. The sidewalks were immaculate, the subway gleamed, the surfaces looked freshly washed, and yet the small convenience store where I bought a rice ball had not

On the window ledge in my office, I keep a license plate hovering just out of direct eyesight. The license plate is near a container of holy dirt from Chimayó I’d collected on my last visit to the pilgrimage site in New Mexico, even though I still had enough dirt at home after I’d scrubbed it onto the back of my skull, trying to stop the inexplicable spasming on the back left quadrant of my head, spasms that sent me to the emergency room on my 39 th birthday in a complete pa