The Golem Memoir

This is a golem. And this is the first chapter of my forthcoming memoir, which combines approximately 87% completely truthful life story with absolute fantasy. If you’re wondering where the fantasy is, just wade a few pages in, until you see the golem appear.

My arms broke one day. I don’t mean that their bones broke — I’ve never had a broken bone — but that my arms’ capacity as limbs, their functionality, coherence, suddenly ended.

Furthermore, my hands ended as hands. They began to hurt so badly that I didn’t want to do anything with them, because that just made them hurt more.

Bless the Y (poem)

Photo: Kenny Holston 21

Bless the women’s locker room where I refresh myself with moisturizer on all
    my limbs my chest my back my feet,
where I lie completely long and stretched in the sauna
warm loose big myself in myself,

A Week in the Life

When the Lambda Literary Review asked me to write an essay documenting a week in my life, I was flattered but afraid of sharing the indignities, anxieties and pleasures of a whole week. It was more fun to share than I’d thought.

Here’s some:

Monday. Make coffee and cereal with blueberries, dates and almonds. A gift to myself. Stimulates the writing. Karen gets up and we jockey for control of the “airwaves”: the right to fill the house with sound. I can only write using voice dictation software because of a disability with my arms, so if I write or use the computer for diddlysquat, Karen can hear everything I’m writing or doing. (“Move down three paragraphs. Start email. Blubbering in the soft humid air. Think about Divine Pussy.”)

For more:

http://www.lambdaliterary.org/features/09/06/the-banal-and-the-profane-donna-minkowitz/