Author Archives: Jonathan Berger

I write a lot but they’re really all the same poem: same themes, same subject matter, same ideas, circled through, iteration after iteration, over and over. I hide it, I switch it up, but everything I write is basically trying … Continue reading →

Dottie is crazy. Was. Dottie was crazy. Her paranoia and confusion over the most basic things made conversations most exhausting. She didn’t want the neighbors to know she was in the hospital because they might talk about it and… care … Continue reading →

Her daughter-in-law living in Long Island had asked me to look in on her but I was at work so I begged off. “Don’t worry,” I said, “I’ve been checking on her a lot lately. We spoke just two days … Continue reading →

Her car stopped turning over the week before she did. While in the hospital she had asked me to take care of it moving the SUV from one side of the street to the other just as the parking rules … Continue reading →

The landlord had been trying to get Dottie out since last year. She’d gotten paperwork warning she needed to vacate be New Year’s Eve. She was eighty years old with no nearby family to take her in but the landlord … Continue reading →

I was relieved to discover that, between my last visit and your last breath, only about fourteen hours passed. I had worried for a while about the fact that you had been alone before you left, that your final days … Continue reading →

Yeah, but, OK… listen, hear me out. What if, what if she’s not dead? What if it’s a mistake and they gave me bad information and she didn’t pass away and they just moved her to another place? No, really. … Continue reading →

I. He told her to clutch the balloon tightly since her allowance only allowed her the purchase of the one. She nodded her head vigorously so he turned his own head and immediately spun around again to her cry and … Continue reading →

Eastman Johnson’s 1873 oil painting, Not at Home, depicts a shaded sumptuous interior of a luxurious 19th Century home but as the plaque points out, climbing up the stairs stage right on the paperboard is a period woman who seems, … Continue reading →

The Statue of Liberty stands in a parking lot in Brooklyn. Or, a Statue of Liberty stands in a parking lot in Brooklyn. It’s not like the that French gift was stolen then shanghaied to this inland location. No, It’s … Continue reading →