Rebecca Foust was born in Altoona, Pennsylvania, a hub of railroading, coal mining and other industries until the middle of the last century. She attended Smith College and Stanford Law School on scholarships and practiced law in San Francisco for ten years. Three kids and many years of Special Ed advocacy later, she enrolled in […]
What I knit at night unravels each dawn, yarn slipping like smoke from the day’s bright needles. A prince once was a boy, a swan, my autistic son. It burns, it burns, his garment of nettle, his singlet of stars. The night cries are feral and awful; my hours are cloistered with wool. […]
When they look at my son like that at the grocery store check out or at school assemblies, I wait for the right moment, till they move through laughter, raised eyebrows, clamped lips —but before fear. Then I switch gears, go into my tap dance-and-shuffle routine. Yes, he’s different, all kids are different, him […]
Sorry that my boy birthed himself too early, took up so much room in your prenatal nursery with his two pounds, two ounces and did not oblige your nurses with easy veins. Sorry we were such pains in your ass asking you to answer our night calls like that, and that he did everything […]
Go ahead, aspire to transcend your hardscrabble roots, bootstrap the life you dream on, escape the small-minded tyranny of your small-minded Midwestern coalmining town. But when you’ve left it behind, you may find it still there, in your dreams, your syntax, the smell of your hair, its real smell, under the shampoo. Beware DNA; […]
My parents wouldn’t come back for damask napkins or oysters in frilly white shells. If you understand, you won’t have to ask how Gramma knew linen—soiled, in the wash she took in each week, or why she had to sell baked goods in the street off “white trash damask,” yesterday’s newspaper. Papap hauled […]
come cone born, encased in diamond-hard coats; something secreted encrypts them against climate and time, lets them wait out the cold-ground generations of winters for that lightning-crack thunderbolt trunk-split of fire to fissure them to life. Dull glitter of years layering down. But when the firestorm comes, the ground melts and boils like stew, […]
Nature went crazy after Hurricane Bob. Salt-shocked leaves flamed red in July against sky preternaturally blue. Pogies flew then rained silver onto the beach, bees grew confused and swarmed in the sea. Marsh murmur hushed in nights without light or sound, thick with black but for Perseids and fireflies. When the […]