Guest Post by Laura Bramon This post originally appeared at “Good Letters” on August 18, 2008. The birds’ wings shake out the smell of the men who sleep in the park: the smell of meat, sweat, and bread. The birds lift up and fly away as I ride my bike through the park’s courtyard, and…

The first time I saw her, I made up a story about her, and it was all wrong. This was in the autumn several years ago, when, in my third-time’s-a-charm attempt at entering the Catholic Church, I stumbled into Adoration each evening at my Capitol Hill parish. Here, in the cool of the day, God’s…

My first rosary is invisible: a string of children’s voices ricocheting off the concrete walls of a slum convent, flying up to God and to the cold gray batting of the Altiplano sky. The children’s eyes are chapped with wind and cold, lines feathered like wings in their brown skin. This gives them a mask…

The summer before you died, I hid on the roof in Tollygunge. I walked part of the way home from Sudder Street and by the time I got to the apartment building where I was staying, the sooty red sunset had spent itself. Dusk sifted in the quarter’s dim air, and from the park by…

In the swelter of Ghana’s heat this past December, I rummaged through my suitcase and found the dress I bought the morning after Rachel’s wedding. It is not a dress anymore. It has not been a dress for years, not since the lean season when I needed new work clothes and my mom cut it…

For seven months, I passed through a season of voices, visitations, strange votes from a memory that would have me believe this friend had touched my hand, that one had risen from the dead. I woke most mornings parched and oddly drunk on whatever I had dreamed, my body full of pain. I finally went…

In Washington, DC’s Forgotten Quadrant the L’Enfant Plaza canyon brims with shapeless bureaucratic hives. It is a zone where plants die, words recycle, and paper-bloated cubes shiver like snowglobes when commuter trains pass. On a bad day, the red tape flows freely and fed lifers nap miserably. On a good day, your tax dollars are…

Recently, I’ve been one of those half-witted people easily caught at her uncensored best or worst. Illness, grief, family chaos, and other calamities have descended, and they have scrambled my brain. In this time, I’ve vacillated between an appetite for things that are beautiful and things that are, well, People magazine worthy. It’s reminded me…

Our first post-wedding-vows fight occurred somewhere between Omaha and Sioux Falls, in a sagging Paseo stuffed with all the wedding gifts that Ben couldn’t force into our U-Haul. A week earlier, we had married in my Missouri hometown; now, we were moving to his home in Montana. As our car lumbered up the snowy interstate,…

Choice: True Stories of Birth, Contraception, Infertility, Adoption, Single Parenthood, and Abortion. Ed. by Karen E. Bender and Nina de Gramont. I picked up Choice, an anthology of women’s stories of infertility, adoption, and abortion, while roaming a bookstore on Christmas Eve. Ever since a college course in reproductive ethics led me to convert from…