I’ve always promised myself I wouldn’t work with anything living, a prohibition I applied first when, in high school, I job-shadowed a pathologist and fainted when watching a lung biopsy, fainted when seeing the wall of stored blood, fainted ad infinitum into the twenty-first century. I couldn’t deal with watching pain, and I hadn’t considered…

Last September, I was in Philadelphia for the first time since my freshman year of college. In the train station, I paid attention to what was new, though I suspect memory shouldn’t take a conscious effort. I thought it would be easy, that I could walk into the mall, down the escalator (I remembered this…

A year ago, I started cooking and learning how to prepare and love food in new ways. How to spend time with it, think about how it comes apart and together, how it draws lines back to heritage and times when I loved my insides, when love had all kinds of ungraspable meanings. I’m lucky…

We’ve beat records for rain this year in central Minnesota. The sidewalks are pillowed with lilacs, and Saint Paul’s hundred-year-old storm sewers bring up syringes and squirrel tails and fish dropped by eagles over the Mississippi’s shore. The rain stains the sides of old high-rises; I love to walk in it and look at the…

My fellowship liaison, Sevko, drove, and his gaze flicked across teenagers spilling over the sidewalks. The center of town spread within the cradle of the mountains, lit by the pink and blue haze of underground clubs. Gray office and apartment buildings faced the street, many of them gashed open, levels of exposed brick and wood…

Last week, I walked up Dale Street from the train station. It’s a perilous walk owing to the lack of shoulder and the speed at which people drive, a recklessness passed off to people living in poor neighborhoods. Shattered green glass, no trees to bar the bright spring sun, bits of fluttering paper garbage—anonymous love…

On Holy Saturday, I woke up at my sister’s house in northern Minnesota with a visual migraine, an aura with no consequent pain. They happen occasionally, and mine are always pretty textbook: wavy sparkling spirals and shimmering crystalline lamellae. The aura is technically termed a scintillating scotoma, a result of a sudden tidal wave of…

Thanksgiving Day after I turned four: high fever at dinner, a drive through a blizzard, then a spinal tap. Meningitis. The nurse promised me angels, and they floated from the bright examination light to the floor, and this is all I remember: paper angels filling the emergency room, snow falling outside, my mother crying. For…

“Benedic, anima mea,” I say each night to the mouse that lives behind my desk. I know what the phrase speaks of a soul, but “animal” often has more meaning to me than “soul.” Occasionally I quote Ada Limón’s poem “The Long Ride”: How good it is to love live things, even when what they’ve…

While I was finishing grad school, I worked two jobs, the first at an infectious disease research center and the second spent tabulating data from death records of women who had been killed by partners. It’s amazing how much data is forgotten in the world, how many trends and progressions are hidden in numbers waiting…