Tonight the Harbor Belongs to Sarah Smarsh
by Ben Miller

Hyatt is a steep street & descending it you meet steep faces of those ascending, enduring the incline laced with storefronts: MVP PIZZA, JIMMY STEINY’S PUB & the NORTHFIELD BANK that is going out of business soon—workplace of teller Colleen who recently, smoking on the curb out front, described herself & her co-workers as “heartbroken about the deal.” Most of those passed are going to work or coming home from work, laden. Staten Island light now is late September butter. It softens steep looks of pain on the faces suffering the hill & who knows what else besides.

The Rock in the Grate
from All The Funny Little Packages: A Husband Meditates on the Mysterious Craft of Marriage 
by Ben Miller

An outlandish luxury of innumerable stops and starts, elegant fade away shots and excruciating close-ups—that’s one definition of a long marriage I’m able to embrace. 

In a week it is possible to together make enough mistakes to get off-track for years, with more years afterward to regain momentum or meander again in stupid old, or nasty new, directions. No other elective relationship takes a simple clock and does such absurd things to it because no other elective relationship is so exclusive (save possibly a third grade friendship), concentrating, while simultaneously diffusing, time. A marriage that lasts is a stirring that is also a settling, a haze and a lens finely ground, and through the smoky glass I peer again. In the ordinary course of affairs there’s not much place for muddling around in the riddle of what a life actually is, while all—even dullness, and especially riddles—can be useful to art. Words, the brightest ones, burn any fuel. Pages can talk to us about us like no human being.