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The reading group (not book club) had begun meeting in January, two months after the midterm elections that had, as they could not yet know, swept the Democrats out of congressional power for the next almost-decade, and Vivek was treated with the mild deference due to someone who had recently suf…

While Clara’s at the grocery store, Hal cuts her Knock Out roses. He wants to have them in a vase in the kitchen for when she walks in the door. He’s trying to make her happy. She used to scratch his back until he went to sleep. He does not know why she stopped doing that but he’s not going to say …

[...] I was just reading and trying to learn how to write from what I read. I wrote like Baraka for a while, I wrote like Creeley for a while, I wrote some Ginsberg poems. I just learned that way. The workshop was useful in that it showed me that people don’t see the poem the same way you do. You t…

There is so much we’ve begun to pile upon you, more
than all the lives we’ve had and have lost. Nothing whatever
burns to ash. Years pass. Days, wisdom, the simple sadness.
A slow-moving ray of sunlight walks me backward
to a past turned magical by the virtue of its emptiness,
this part of mys…

Perhaps it is because I read that mice do not experience humor, not as such. Joy, yes, sadness, yes, camaraderie, esprit de corps, et cetera, yes, but humor, no. I then began to ask myself, To what degree do humans truly experience humor? To what degree is the experience of laughter real?

Possib…