Breathing on Your Own: Tips for Breaking That Nasal Spray Addiction Maybe it starts with a cold, allergies, hay fever—at any rate, you’re stuffy and congested, and maybe all night you sniffle and snort and toss and turn and bounce off the bed to…

Drowning Inside the Self My Norwegian grandmother tells me that I have “Viking blood” within me. She says it makes me stubborn and it makes me strong. When she tells me this I fidget uncomfortably in the wooden chair I am sitting on in…

A Thousand Words Sitting on a trunk under the basement stairs, I slit through duct tape with my Swiss Army knife, boxes of albums sealed since I mailed them to myself ten years ago when I cleared out my mother’s apartment. She saved our…

Bloodletting   Hypergraphia: The opposite of writer’s block. An overwhelming compulsion or urge to write. Hypergraphics will keep rambling journals, jot thoughts on scraps of paper, draft long letters, compile dictionaries, and often write on any available surface. Some alleged famous hypergraphics: Sylvia Plath,…

from Leafmold The yard and driveway maintained through all seasons. Leak above drop in ceiling causing obvious damage. The saints of fire dance sideways through the scene. Toilet in front bath leaks into basement. The subject of every love song is actually the self.…

Walking it Off Walking in Manhattan and DC is a point-to-point experience. You walk to the train, subway in one, metro in the other, then from the station to work, to a sale, to a concert, in short to get somewhere. I can’t recall…