• ADOPTION FOR DUMMIES

    There is one thing that none of the books on discovering who you are when you are adopted bother to tell you. If they did, it wouldn’t change anything, but it is a burden you assumed you’d easily bear that grows heavy with time. What they don’t warn you is that you will discover yourself,…


  • SELF?

    There is one thing that none of the books on discovering who you are when you are adopted bother to tell you. If the did, it wouldn’t change anything, but it is a burden you assumed you’d easily bear that grows heavy with time. What they don’t warn you is that you will discover yourself,…


  • A CHILDHOOD

    I have fond memories of a childhood I never lived. Those are the best childhoods from for they reflect life as you meant it to be lived. In this life my father is in his late nineties, still smiles when he sees me, not didn’t clutch his chest sixty-one years ago, didn’t fall to the…


  • UNKNOWING

    I don’t know what                                                I am, the Buddha said. I don’t know why                                      …


  • PATER INCOGNITA

    He often comes to me in dreams. In most he is faceless, but intently present, speaking in a voice I instantly know, nothing like mine and totally mine. On occasion his face appears, blurred, as if seen through a scrim, back-lit, vague, an actor in some film I have seen, but yet not that person,…


  • DACHAIGH

    Even when I was briefly in Edinburgh I dreamed of walking the streets of Lisbon or Porto, looking into the faces of older men and wondering if this one was my father, the one I had never seen, never known. the one my Jewish mother described in detail to the social worker who took me…


  • UNTO TARSHISH

    In this place there is a fatted, sacrificial silence. It is the large Jewish Cemetery nestling the road where Maryland and the District are loosely stitched together. It is a small plot goldenrod dirt outskirting Lisbon. This ground is sacred not for the blessing of one who has taken the tallit of holiness. The sanctity…


  • WHISPERED SONG

    “Oh, Woman who walks in beauty like the night I am a friend who is distant and silent.” — Dineh Wind Prayer We always sat on the back bench seat of the Collins Avenue bus, stared out the big window, noses pressed against the cool glass, stared at the procession of stucco hotels, simple neon…


  • FIRST TIME

    It looks perfectly normal, the kind of restaurant you would seek out on a Friday night in a distant city. The people look like those you know or could know, those from home for instance. She is not remarkable, blonde, older, a slightly twisted smile, blue eyes, but on meeting there is a sudden distance…


  • CHILD OF GHOSTS

    I am a child of ghosts, my parents adopted and birth, all visit me, but only in my dreams, for ghosts prefer the reality that dreams allow. Some say that dreams are not real, but they live in the mind as do every other reality I experience each day, my senses merely inexact lenses for…