You are currently browsing stories tagged with “homelessness.”
In the summer of 1973, my younger brother and I shared a basement apartment on East 12th Street in Brooklyn off Avenue J, a nice middle-class sort of area. We had lost our parents to cancer and a stroke, ten months apart, a few years before this, when he was fourteen and I was sixteen. They’d left us a little [...]
During the middle of my spring semester, I remembered the homeless man in front of the 21st street CTown. He was the poem in my poetry workshop. He was the protagonist of my memoir workshop free-write. I remembered my love for him. My professor loved him from the first paragraph. I went to high school in Long Island City, LIC [...]
(Author’s Note: I saw the homeless woman sitting in front of Saks Fifth Avenue holding her sign, interacting with the passers by, taunting some, flirting with others, cajoling the rest, So I gave her a name, created her back story and decided to tell it as I thought she might.) A Yellow Cashmere Scarf “She always wanted a yellow cashmere [...]
On a blustery December evening on my way to a friend’s dinner party, I stopped in front of a jumbo cardboard box on the steps of the church around the corner. “Jim?” I called out. A moment later a hand emerged and gave a little wave, followed by a head with tousled, graying hair. “Hi,” Jim said, extending his arm [...]