The Whale Burns His Own Body

The Whale Burns His Own Body

What always shocked the Moby Dickheads was a whaleboat’s flimsiness, how squat the gunnels, how thin the planks separating whalers from depthless ocean and the 65-ton sperm whale they’d stabbed. All yesterday I’d been stuck working the whaleboat exhibit. That meant...
My One and Only, Moonbean

My One and Only, Moonbean

Photo by Anna Sui The Moonbean café, unyielding and un-air-conditioned sits right at the border of Kensington Market in Toronto, Canada. For as long as I remember, which isn’t too long in the grand schemes of things when the scheme is the scale of Toronto, it’s been...
Skirting Around the Crater

Skirting Around the Crater

If we were not divorcing, you’d gaze with expectation of my response when telling me that large fragments from outer space crash onto earth, create craters that never fill, except with a perennial stream. If we were not discussing lawyers and fees and settlements in...
An ecological disaster of parakeets

An ecological disaster of parakeets

He worries about his mother reciting a list of salad leaves at her apartment door, about the silvering of the hairs at his temple and on his chin, and about the 12,000 green parakeets that shouldn’t be here. ‘What if they ate all the other birds?’ my partner asks me,...
Some Place Like Smoke Hole

Some Place Like Smoke Hole

“Smoke Hole Historic Marker” by Jimmy Emerson, DVM is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 In the fall, we go camping; we drive for five hours to get to Smoke Hole, West Virginia, even though there are plenty of campsites around Baltimore, even though there are beach...