Miles away in a different life...

There was an audible gasp when they heard he* was gone A whoosh of air that sounded exactly like the bottom falling out of his mother’s** world the winds of mortality brushing his father’s** face the last breath of a kind soul All the years of struggle have settled into silence: Unsought,...

The words we cast to fill the silence left by one we loved never are enough.

Knit six purl six sets of two rows four rows six rows up to twelve, patterns, repeating, steady, soothingly same. This is not what life is like. Life is like picking up a tousled hunk of yarn pulled out of the basket by an impatient child looking for a string too many times. You find an end. You...

There is no algebra for death. No life lost cancels out another. The idea that there is some other side to the equation is a lie perpetrated by centuries of war and revenge. There is no other side. You cannot subtract and equalize the equation. There is an addition of loss, grief upon grief upon...

Inexplicable. How we rise each morning, instead of burying our heads under bedcovers, sewing them shut. Why we keep on welcoming babies with bone-deep joy to this sordid world. How we fill burlap sacks with grit and gratitude, our hands shredded as we drag one over the other....

A man sits on the rubble— not just in the rubble, but on the pile of what remains. No people in the bombed-out houses. No dogs. No birds. Just ragged hunks of concrete and loss. And on his perch he is playing an instrument constructed of what is left—an olive oil can, a broom handle, a bowed...