When “I do” has nothing to do with marriage
If I told you that’s the moment I ran out of that church and down the street until a stranger in a red Ford Bronco pulled over and said climb in, I would be lying. I wasn’t that brave. I looked into the kind brown eyes of the man who loved me and I said I do. I do take this man, tears of laughter streaming down my face.
Mama, mother, mommy, marmi
Our mothers are the darkest mystery that shine above us, always calling us home.
Four Days on a Deserted Island
I was a hummingbird living in an intoxicating city. Even the smell of the exhaust fumes of the cars thrilled me. It was all heady – the museums, the history, the concrete and the sizzling dance club.
Story & Sexuality
There is an optimismto every metaphor, to every leaf falling like a forgotten dream. Writing is the one thing you cannot deny, or the story will go to someone else.
Grief in the Eyes of a Hundred Turkeys
I was in a landslide of my own making, and I lived as if I was dying. Until I went to Italy, and I threw a coin into Trevi fountain, the muscled cement gods staring at me. I made a wish for all of it to stop, right after that wish, it did stop.
I Asked the Universe for El Diablo – she sent him
I was ready for tongue and skin and fire and molten. My nipples became a beacon for my next lover’s hands.
The universe heard me, and sent El Diablo.
My soul healed a man I hardly knew
I went into his bedroom, where he was naked on white sheets on this hot summer night, and sleeping, his small, muscled body and limbs like a starfish, and I hovered over him, and put my (hands?) on his right shoulder.
Risky Sexual Behavior, Pandemics & Grief
I moved through my grief, by sleeping with men I didn’t know. Through nightclubs and Madonna and sex in parking lots, from England to Rome to South America. I had sex with a priest, my therapist, an architect, and a stock broker.
If something didn’t happen to you, it doesn’t mean it didn’t happen
Denial is a powerful tool. We can forgive the people who prefer to live inside a bubble of denial, until it touches their lives.
Marrying the wrong person was necessary
This had to happen, so I could meet the man I did love, the man who opened my heart and my legs and set me on fire, the man who would eventually die.
A proposal of friendship, just say yes
Her eyes still burned through my skin. During this time, she was asking my soul to remember.
My First Love had two wives
He was my father and my husband, my soul mate and my first friend, my mentor and my thick bodied angel on earth.
The Math of Love is Infinity
Falling in love is directional, a going down, a spiral, but perhaps instead of falling in love we need to rise in love.
My father’s boat was a mistress
My father’s boat settled a very long war waging inside him – whether or not he sacrificed enough for his family.
The Lovers
so that now when any man touches me
they are touching you,
all of us drunk on the desire of the ages.
The in between of Life and Death
I pretended the psychic Russian countess had never whispered you were going to die into my ear.
Desire, a poem
My hands are bloody from taking blackberries off reluctant vines and I have woke in the night to wild pigs.
When a dead friend showed up in my car
Ben lived in an abandoned upstairs apartment that smelled of stale cigarettes, whiskey, and oil paint.
How marrying the man I didn’t love led me to love
All the women in my family who married men they didn’t love were tucked into the train of my wedding dress being dragged up the aisle with me.
My grandmother had three boyfriends, then she had a stroke
When we arrived to the hospital, my grandmother was in a coma and three men were crying at the foot of her bed.
Searching for my dead lover through the bodies of strangers
I lived for both the pleasure and the pang, the sliver of light in the darkness,.
I drank that first summer in Italy down to the nipple, sucking flesh off a tiny bone of baccalà.
How a naked woman walking out of the ocean awakened something in all of us
The young naked woman spoke to all of us who always leave something on – a t-shirt, underwear, a lacy bra, shame. She spoke to the masks, to the too much of everything we carry with us