Category: Writing
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The Old Neighborhood in Winter, A Villanelle
The marriage, the move, my divorce,Lovers come and gone, the children grownNow on city streets of joy and tears I walk alone. Some bungalows and Tudors in renovation,Others with lamp-lit windows where memories are sownMarriage, the move, my separation. I do not shed nostalgia, or weep at daysGone by. My memories are honed.These city streets…
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Retirement Reading
I read more now than I did whileI was teaching. I’m not joking: I can pick and choose from any shelf in my study, sans guilt, sans deadline, duty free. I read three cats’ minds. And my neighbor’s lips. The first and last pages of Finnegan’s Wake. Listen, just before tea I read the tag…
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Sign Read CLOSED
And yet, somehow, the day remained open.The bark you touched finished your thoughtslike a stiff drink. Sometimes, all you could think aboutwas a merry-go-round. Sometimes your eyes saw greyand looked like wood smoke. But this day was the colorof being pulled on, of driving too far East. A house, a house,another house, and then a…
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Writing for Justice
Cecilia hunched over her computer. No one told her being a lawyer would involve so much writing. Almost every day. Actually, every day. Working in family law was somehow more taxing. Every day, families splitting, yelling, crying. And a combination of writing briefs and their subject matter made her hunch more, cowering beneath the gravity…
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Hitchhiking in the 70’s
Impossible impasse: your guitar case kicks at knee level, one thumb in the air. Both eyes marooned on the taillights ahead. The callous cold. The gloves too thin. Red numb thumbs exposed to a curse the woods shouts out to everyone who walks near here this time of year. There must be ice in a…
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Cov-Son-19
Apologies to John Donne Lock down my brain, deep state Panopticus,Lest I run from thee and get off the grid.9/11, then stuxnet, now Covid:Methinks paranoia ran off with us,Like some inky squid with a damn octopus,Eyes, ears, here, there, battening down my lidWhere late my thinking lurked — a locked ward kidGone mad, an opioid…
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Birds of a Feather
Count backwards from 99. What’s the first thing you remember waking up? Back from permanent loan, a temporary tattoo on your forearm, you pour whiskey over ice, two fingers deep— the temperature on the front of the local bank the first sign that something was amiss in the month of October. Jobs are coming or…
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Shooting Star
Like a shooting star across the sands of time your breath in the snow trails like crystallized ice in a galaxy lost in the world of far, far away beyond the silence that is all roses. Brief moments glisten in moist patches of memory, fragments, shards, jagged remnants of places and events. How knowing is…
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Technetium Element 43
Hexagonal crystal structure silver fox of the table unstable Wavering in amongst the cooling red giants showing off stellar nucleosynthesis traces of Tc dredged up revealed to us in the spectrum shimmering First element produced synthetically (found rarely inside the earth) Squeezed in between molybdenum and ruthenium lowest-number of all radioactive isotopes separated from its…
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Year of the Rat
… sittin’ on the dock of the bayWatchin’ the tide roll away . . . (Otis Redding & Steve Cropper) We’re sitting on splinters, watching and whistling as the world falls apart. As if all we have to do is bide our time until the next tide rolls in to cleanse our consciences. As…
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Oasis
My mother smoked Camels, the animal, not the cigarettes. Men would slit the throat and hang it from a palm tree until it had been drained of blood, had its stomach swept of entrails and organs. She would gather wood, mostly cedar, and brood a small fire from which to cook. She was the kindest…
