so I think I have bad ones.

Why are you so fat?

The doctor says I can’t help it.

He says I may not look normal,

but I’m healthy enough to carry the stars,

and this fat keeps me safe.

Why are you so fat?

Because I love school lunches: meat pies and yogurt cups

and a giant cookie, and then after school

I take the five dollars my parents give me

and buy slices of pizza from Mario’s and play the old Pac-Man machine until dark,

stack quarters along the edge

until I pass the second apple.

Why are you so fat?

My parents are never really home anyway.

They’re busy,

and I fill myself up with food and watching TV,

comic books, and going to the park, and hot dogs with ketchup and onions.

Why are you so fat?

Sometimes I get home to an empty apartment

and the echo of the cars going by on the street outside.

Why are you so fat?

Because if someone asks enough times,

then the question becomes the answer.

Moving

When your mother is an artist,

you move a lot.

We stretched ourselves

across the whole country

from New York to San Francisco,

far from our family

and everything we knew.

For the artist,

making a new life

is as simple

as scraping off a palette,

setting up a new studio.

For me

the studio means

quiet corners

with slabs of clay,

sketch pads

and universes,

hands and face chalked

with pastels, potato chip grease,

and Pepsi.

Spider-Man comics,

The Hobbit, and Bridge to Terabithia.

For me it means waiting.

It means space,

suspended in time

between the mother

who is the Artist,

the father who is too busy,

and a son

whose story is about being

the new kid in seventh grade,

awkward, big, different

from everyone else.

Since Leaving New York

we haven’t celebrated

the high holidays like we used to,

with the rest of the family.

It’s like things that used to matter

suddenly don’t anymore.

I didn’t know I cared.

I thought of it as something we just did,

who we are, but now that it’s gone,

I think about those long tables

back in New York,

overflowing with food

and candles at Shabbat,

and the grown-ups

talking long into the night,

the cousins playing ring-a-levio

outside, or capture the flag.

When we left,

they stopped talking to us,

or we stopped talking to them,

like we were all suddenly

not in the same story anymore.

When I tell this to my father

on the way to the rabbi’s office,

his eyes get wet,

so I don’t say anything else.

Rabbi’s Office

Right away I am nervous

because we are already

a year late in the process

of my bar mitzvah because my parents

just didn’t make the time.

My father waits outside,

and I go in.

The first thing I notice