drmstream[writing]

This must be the week that small presses, indie jour­nals and agents plow through their in-boxes. I’ve got­ten a slew of rejec­tions this week — no inter­ests on a short novel I’ve been send­ing around, no thanks you’s on a cou­ple of sto­ries that are cir­cu­lat­ing and flat out nopes on an essay I had […]

I love you with every piece of my being. I’m inside you all the time. I am strong because you are strong. I see beauty because you are beau­ti­ful.  I can be open and gen­er­ous because you hold my heart gen­tly. You but­tress the peo­ple around you. I want you to know that I will but­tress you, I […]

  You worked hard to keep us from see­ing you straight on, didn’t you? That was hard, I imag­ine, when you walked through your day with a cam­era around your neck. No, you put your­self on the other side. The other side of what, that’s what I won­der. Was it the other side of life altogether? […]

Sit­ting in the sec­ond story of a two-story row house in Brooklyn’s South Slope, I searched for the voice that would tell my 21-year old daugh­ter Becky some­thing about liv­ing. She’s laid up with a bro­ken foot that’s keep­ing her from work­ing at the micro-distillery where she found a job after com­ing back from Louisiana, […]

My rea­son for lay­ing beside you and smelling like beer When you fin­ish read­ing this I want you to be able to paint The sky I saw when I walked out To the garbage bin at dusk. Look up past the spring buds Blur­ring the kinky ends of the ginko To the rib­bon of sky, upended by […]

Fifty years ago, my mom was at the begin­ning, my dad was at the begin­ning, I was about to start. We were all in Worces­ter, in the lit­tle apart­ment. Nine months was com­ing to an end: the mar­riage was 11 months old. What voices ran through their minds? It was a start­ing out. They were […]

On late days one sum­mer, I would walk through the rich heat to the small chapel in the sac­risty in the rear of the church, off the cor­ri­dor that joined the monastery and the church together. Bishop Ans­gar would say Mass each after­noon: sepul­chral, solemn, devout. What I can remem­ber about those Masses was how […]

What if each moment you lived was imbued with a pur­pose that had such clar­ity, such con­sis­tency and such inten­sity that it fed an inner sense of well-being and self-esteem? I know that my per­sonal frame of ref­er­ence would be to doubt the valid­ity of this mean­ing, as if the only accept­able pos­ture toward life […]