Published Pieces
2020
- Babe, Thin Air Magazine (Forthcoming)
- Music and Transcendence (Reprint), Reverberations Magazine
- Rounding, Five on the Fifth
2019
- The Voice, Green Briar Review
- The Power of Music and Transcendence, Be a Light Collective
- Striking a Fire in the Void, Medium
- A Day in the Neighborhood, Litbreak Magazine
- Six Days on the Mountain, Ginosko Literary Journal
- The Power of the Five-Minute Writing Exercise, Medium
- On Nostalgia and Old Homes, Medium
- Finnish Glades, Medium/A Few Words
- Finnish Boy, Scarlet Leaf Review
- Split, The Write Launch
2018
2017
- The Whispering Magic of Sufjan Stevens, Reverberations Magazine
- Alone à Paris, The Vignette Review
- The Living, Short Fiction Break
Honors
- Wesleyan University’s Herbert Lee Connelly Writing Prize in Creative Nonfiction for Split
Published Excerpts
Alone à Paris
I don’t know why I went to Paris alone for a month.
I had never been completely alone anywhere other than Long Island, so I knew it was an awful idea from the moment I clicked proceed on the Air France credit card confirmation screen.
But I couldn’t have backed out. Those haute-couture bastards already had my money.
* * *
I don’t like to describe myself as a “Francophile”. If I had to, I could name a dozen philes that would be grounds for arrest. That said, I have been obsessed with everything French since junior high, and over the past nine years, I’ve watched hundreds of French YouTube videos and films. I’ve befriended French people, eaten countless plates of garlic-cured escargots and crunchy baguette wands, and learned to pronounce pretentious French brand names and phrases I’ve been told make you seem intriguing at dinner parties.
“Where’d you get that cardigan? Ah, from Comptoir des Cotonniers? How . . . à la mode.”
Of course, I’ve even honed that nasally, phlegm-filled, I’ve-been-smoking-since-I-was-ten accent to the point where it now sounds near-native.
I guess I do know why I went to Paris for a month.
* * *
Absorbing the city of love, alone, was more disheartening than it sounds. I would often find myself dining behind young, attractive Parisian couples who believed sloppy kisses at quaint street-side cafés were more enticing than the beautifully garnished dishes of confit-de-canard sitting untouched below their chins.
“Vous désirez, monsieur?” waiters would ask as they slipped up to my table.
“Une petite amie et un verre de Bordeaux,” I would respond, cupping a hand in the air, swirling it like a pint of sweet red wine. I’d then wave them off before they could tell me that they didn’t sell girlfriends by the glass like they did their Bordeaux.
* * *
Perhaps profligately, I decided to spend hours locked in my hotel room, plucking the oily strings on my acoustic guitar, accruing the admiration of a polite cleaner with a lisp and a long facial scar who passed through the hall every so often. After he complimented my dexterity for the third time, I realized I wasn’t making great use of my time.
So I chose to venture out of my comfort zone and headed to the Sacré Cœur, a sprawling limestone basilica overlooking the city. Upon arrival, I found a comfortable spot on the stairs out front and watched the cloudy afternoon sky give way to a brilliant orange sunset.
It took me a while to really notice, but all around me were people – French, German, Italian, Spanish, British, American – interacting with each other. Some danced and sang along to the bass-thumping rhythms of Belgian rapper Stromae that streamed out of a beat-up nineties jukebox. Some posed for pictures on the marble balcony overlooking the distant buildings scattered along the horizon. A few shared passionate French kisses.
Others pecked. Many hugged. Talked. Some were alone like me.
The tension in my neck loosened. I closed my eyes and lay back on the steps and focused on the hum of everything. Tranquil white noise, like rain. Then I sat back up, opened my eyes, and let my head bounce to the ebb and flow of the music, the laughs, the click of handheld cameras. I melted into the city. That little microcosm.
I know why I went to France alone for a month. But I guess feeling alone is a matter of perspective.
Works in Progress
The Drive
He’s sitting in the truckbed right over the wobbly back wheel reading the picture book he’s had his little head stuffed in since I picked him up a couple miles back. I watch him in the glare of the rearview mirror as we rumble on. His hair is flapping long and matted in the wind like the dirty tail of a mop and he looks the kind of disheveled that no kid should ever be, his face smeared in all kinds of dust and hardened goop and sagging so far down his bones he looks a good four or five years older than he probably is.
He didn’t say a word when I offered to bring him to the police station. Headed past Bruxton anyway, I said. Wouldn’t be no trouble. He just stood up out of the gravel and looked both ways even though we were far off the road and then climbed his way into the back and squatted like he’d done it a dozen times before. I feel like I should comfort him—poor kid’s probably scared, anyhow—so I slide open the back window and call out over the clack of the engine, Doing all right back there?
Nighttime on the Highway
The tachometer sputters and the engine whirs below the musings of a lonely singer. Everything that happens, he croons through the speakers, a guitar thrumming warmly under him, is from now on. I twist up the volume knob and shift my grip on the steering wheel so I can see my hands glowing in the moonlight spearing through the windows.
I work the gas and the asphalt blurs under the hood, worn and fissured and charred with black tire tracks, and even though I don’t believe in an afterlife, I wonder if this is what limbo is like. Speeding on a nighttime highway past equally solitary cars, music vibrating against the doors in an eternal loop.
Looking for Color
God, what a shit weekend.
Woes started two nights ago. I was sifting through bills in the kitchen when Natty burst out of his room screaming like his balls got snipped. Figured it was just another ordinary night terror but didn’t expect he’d be running around and beating his head with his fists. I didn’t really know what to do, so I chased him through the house, trying to call out reassurances over his yells, until he tripped and pounded his knee on one of the floorboards in my bedroom. At that point words didn’t much matter so I carried him to his room and held him close and rocked him till he woke up.
He cried for a while. I spent the time smoothing his hair. When he was done he wiped his face and looked up at me with these terrified wide eyes. He said this time he saw a giant made of shadows. It was slow and it growled and when it moved the world shook. It was trying to crush him with its feet. He said he kept calling for me but I didn’t come. Maybe because I just couldn’t hear, he tried reasoning with himself. Maybe because I just couldn’t answer.
