Diana Rosen

Posted on April 14, 2023 in As It Ought To Be Magazine You’d think exiting a drive-in movie theater would be easy but my younger siblings and their friends are hollering as if they’re on a daredevil carnival ride causing me to tap the car behind me,…

I place spearmint jelly candies, candles, pecan Turtles for my mother, favorite lines of comedians my father loved, written as if prayers; artwork created y cousins Darryl and Leah, long since deceased; a photo of the blue robin’s egg in a nest in…

How to Love Run Arms outstretched to the edge of the high board. Jump up, thumbs touching. Curve your body downward toward the sparkling aqua gem of an inside sea and dive right in. From The Tiny Publisher, a full-length poetry collection by DIANA…

My love is in the kitchen, baking popovers. The heat of the kitchen, or the intensity of his concentration makes him sweat from head to toe. He delivers mine on a gold-rimmed plate, so proud. I break it apart, dab it in the accompanying jam and…

Sponge baths, toilette, feeding adults unable to lift a fork. Each client is different, each client is a gift, yet we both recognize how the story ends. John, on the precipice of dementia, was shuffled from doctor to doctor by ambulance, his social…

He was storybook tall, dark, handsome. Loved jazz as I do. Took me to smoke-filled rooms where we listened to Joe, Arthur, Ella as we sat side by side; his manner formal, discreet, his clothes impeccable. He introduces me to his friends hosting a…

In the heart of this desert-wide eternally beige dry city, my best friend Maggie and I reach the top floor of Senior Arms where Uncle Joe (everyone calls him Uncle Joe,) opens the door before we knock.“Welcome to the Penthouse,” he says as Auntie…

In our Sears catalog house, boundaries are drawn by downstairs Mommy, angry at her upstairs mother-in-law who rules over a kosher kitchen, a paying boarder in the attic, a world changing without her consent. For my sister and me, this duplex is two…

Buffy walks among the mourners, oblivious to the Brooks Brothers men, women in patent leather Ferragamo flats determinedly correct yet gossiping about the funeral, second-guessing about The Will. They had grown old together. Buffy, always an enigma,…

You describe the weight like those of the black marble sphinxes you loved in the downtown library: cold, hard, so heavy they need stone pedestals to support them. You reveal how this new depression is like that maze of mirrors you got lost in at the…