The gate to the gangway of our houseboat hangs crooked and the floating home itself leans to one side at low tide. My little finger is crooked and the ring toe on my left foot is crooked too. My back has grown crooked, at least when I rise as I’ve aged, and my grin has been crooked all along. Nothing about me is straight unless you consider my sexuality but what’s so straight about that, implying that others are crooked because of who they like and love.

There’s a bend to the world, a bend to life, a bend to my body—several in fact—and as my own thinking bends I re-visit the word crooked and its un-straight meanings and implications and the way it can be taken as unattractive and even dishonest and I think of the beauty and honesty of arcs, the lovely magnificence of jagged coastlines and how straight is never really straight, at least for long, how eternity is a myth, like straight that exists for a while and then curves, how I curl my crooked fingers around the bent handle of my slightly crooked cup which suggests that other imperfect hands made this perfectly crooked cup. I take a sip and smile crooked thoughts and look at these crooked lines I’ve written on this margin-less page and the uneven spaces they’ve made where I fit in and fill them with my perfectly crooked life.

Bio: Guy Biederman