Dear Mom, Hi! I keep wanting to call you, but this is easier. I’m writing from Laugarvatn, Iceland. The wind has been shaking my wooden, low-gabled room with its many windows for three non-consecutive days. Yesterday it took a break and let me catch up on sleep. It...
Photo: “The Green Line in Nicosia (Cyprus)” by Marco Fieber is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 I would like to tell you about the kafenion, about the cat that lived there, and the cheese rinds I fed it. About the coffee-shop owner who was hit by a car, and the...
Molten candy peach nectar streams over lips salty- licked, pistachios shucked on steep dunes, stoic veined bookends, marble slipping welcome into cotton gloves worn by the waves. The sea open tide all the way to Africa. My spaces draw onto creased linen, fried rigid...
Photo: agsaz / Shutterstock.com After my visit to the Royal Alcazar, I stopped at a café and sat outside, relishing the almost-warmth in that last day of December, sipping the thick hot chocolate and dipping fat fingers of churros into it, telling myself it was my...
It’s ten minutes to 7 and mordant sunlight is leaking through the gaps in the broken curtains. I can feel the gold light on my face and understand the meaning of the term ‘sun-drenched.’ I keep my eyes closed, letting my eyelids burn under the weight of the fulgent...
The same guy who gave Ron Swanson a snifter at Lagavulin was the same guy who taught me how to pull whiskey from a barrel, a skill I’ve never used since. In 2016, he was smaller than on TV, only to my shoulder, and I wondered how we shrank over time and in real life,...
