visual art
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Getting Fragonard’s Goat
A cabinet painting, measuring only 12″ by 7″ in Gallery 7 of the Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco, is half the size of a neighboring Watteau (1684-1721). The artist, 38-year-old Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732-1806), was Watteau’s true successor as a specialist in romantic comedy. Both artists exemplify the French Rococo’s appetite for…
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#TheGreatConspirator
The hall is dark. The mood is blissful. My breathing is natural. Relaxed. In community with 49 others, my body is gleaming, serene. Glowing. Suddenly my mind veers off. My thoughts race back to Trump’s remarks earlier today during his celebratory speech—the day after his impeachment acquittal—flaming, toxic, hazardous. Vile. Only the tranquil voice of…
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D minor
It plays who, when, where I am. Maybe why. They call it being in your “late teens.” As if your adulthood were somehow hurrying to arrive, to get past the protected pop songs of childhood and into something serious. I’m in my late teens, in the evening, late in the year, which means it’s already…
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Myrtle Avenue Dirt
Thanks for sending me back to all that is fresh, where I can still see it and smell it and feel it across these scores of years. As you read me, as you hear me, do I hold your hand, and are we seven years old again? See: that’s me, the chubby kid with the…
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Calluses
That boat had been my home for going on four months. I lived, breathed, ate, slept, smoked, drank, waxed, waned, loved, and hated on that boat. My mother has told me, “you’ll never go home again,” a phrase that always bothered me, but this phrase had fallen flat as this boat was the one home…
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Encounter with Tommie
Fresh air mingled with cigarette smoke with the inhale. The exhale was warmed by sidewalk heat mingled with cool mist of an open fire hydrant. Tommie enjoys for the moment kids at play in the flooded street, laughing, splashing water fights. Cars stop just before the pool eyeballing the biggest kid directing the fire hydrant…
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Pump
I don’t remember the actual diagnosis. I remember later, in the hospital, my mom sitting by the bed and crying with a hand over her eyes. I recall a nurse, wearing the bright scrubs of the pediatrics ward—green, pink, blue, with dancing bears or smiling frogs—as she handed me a fat orange, showing me how…
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The Rules Are Simple
“Tag,” Susie yelled. “You’re it.” And she ran off as fast as she could. Joel was surprised. One moment he had been drinking a small carton of chocolate milk at the lunch-benches with his friend Jason, the next he was “it.” To make it stick, all the kids sitting with him jumped up and ran…
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Forum Literary Magazine 