Tag: writer

Why You Should Try Meditating While Running (and How to Do It)

meditationrunningginaI’m running down Kelly Drive in Philadelphia on an unseasonably warm fall day, my purple sneakers softly thudding against the ground. As I run, I notice a young boy skateboarding on the street, and the way his red hat flops to the side. I pass dry-looking trees and plump geese gathered in the grass next to the trail, and a couple kissing on a rock overlook. I notice the way the water ripples as a racing shell cuts cleanly through the center of the Schuylkill River and glides away from me.

Would you guess that I’ve been meditating this whole time?

Read the rest of my article in Runner’s World.

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5 Things I Learned From Taking Yoga In A Foreign Language For A Month

It was filled with shots like a stunning aerial view of Vatican City from the dome of St. Peter’s Cathedral; plates of spaghetti and glasses of red wine resting on a classic checked tablecloth on a candlelit Trastevere evening; me laughing behind Ray-bans on a boat off Capri Island in glimmering sunlight.

Of course, it’s Instagram. So what it didn’t show was the truth: that I was feeling a little sick and sluggish. I was wiped out from the constant travel, daily planning, organizing itineraries, and sightseeing—combined with eating heaps of mozzarella and an ungodly amount of prosciutto.

Read the rest here.

“Death of a Goat” in Whirlwind Magazine’s Paralysis issue

The Death of a Goat

            “My brother was killed like a goat,” Boi said, leaning up against the crumbling concrete wall of the old campsite.

“What?” I said.

“That’s why I didn’t watch when they killed the goat today. My brother was killed like a goat.”

“That’s awful, Boi. I’m so sorry.”

I leaned against the wall next to him, my mind racing with doubts—about if I could begin to understand his situation, if I could appropriately respond, and then, just as quickly, if Boi was telling the truth, if his brother really was beheaded with a knife.

I had not noticed that Boi hadn’t watched the slaughter of the goat with the rest of us that day. Yet he felt as if he should explain himself, as if the absence of his presence was abnormal and required justification.

“Did you watch?” He asked me inquisitively, but with no judgment behind the question.

 

Read the rest of the story at Whirlwind Magazine.

 

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“Bastille Day, Philadelphia” published in Painted Bride Quarterly

“Lips and your beard and dark doorways
and the sense that I didn’t quite understand how the stars hung that way,
or the way we’d partied and drank Coronas
at a prison where men had languished and died in
feverish, dreamless solitude,
where they had locked up Al Capone until
time slipped on and on enough,
and suddenly we were drunk and shouting “Vive la France,”
eating cake a woman tossed to us from a mossy stone tower
in a pink Victorian dress.”

Read the full poem online in Painted Bride Quarterly.

 

“Old Story” poem published in Eunoia Review

“…Just the feeling, in the suburbs, over coffee, over pavement,
that I didn’t know him at all,
and that I would cease to exist if I left him now.
Just the same old banal love story,
older than Europe and concrete and cuneiform,
that makes every country song a prophecy.”

Read the full poem at Eunoia Review.

Entropy Magazine: Variations on a Theme

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Entropy Magazine: Variations on a Theme

Sadness Or

by: Gina Tomaine

It was in the sixth hour of traffic on the turnpike from Pennsylvania to Boston that I began to gather my courage. I had been thinking about him, musing about the past, since the night before, and now, after these isolated hours of thought and noise and the road, I felt an overwhelming impulse to call. My cell phone rested slanted in my cupholder, tipping into the styrofoam side of the cold cup of coffee that had been sitting there, half-finished, since a bathroom stop in Connecticut somewhere around hour three. My console lit up with numbers and words that looked like bright red hieroglyphics—the display had been broken for years, and only showed random lines, which could be a five, or a four, or a seven, but never what song was playing, what track of a CD, what radio station. I still had to use CDs, since a plug-in for my iPhone had also become uselessness and disjointed – first only playing out of one side of the car speakers, then crackling on that side, then failing to emit any sound at all. Everything in my car was slightly askew, slightly dysfunctional, and yet it was the most comforting place I knew. It was a refuge…

Read the full piece here.