sex, death

One regret I have about not having been born a man is never being called a gentleman. 

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I think of menopause as the end of biological usefulness. The dizzy faltering, the ache, the everything. 

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Cesar Vallejo expected to die on a Thursday, as he wrote in one of his poems. But he died on a Friday, Good Friday, “aching without explanation.” 

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Every year when my kids’ birthdays arrive I remember the German word for placenta is “Mutterkuchen,” literally ’mother cake.’ 

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If I were a man, my pants would be waiting for me when I woke up. Right where I left them. Rumpled on the floor. 

Forming a church. Maybe a steeple. 

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My mother finds it a tragedy when a man goes bald. She never fails to comment - ‘Oh him, he went bald.’ An old boyfriend of mine, a client at her firm, has not escaped this fate, she tells me. Rather, she whispers it to me, as if I were in on a joke.