Category: articles
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Baseballs and CoVid
Weston Philips was a collector by nature. He didn’t realize it until today, but it seemed to have been a constant for most of his life. There was the boyhood coin collection, the football game programs, and then, one that was ongoing, the baseball scorecards, beginning with the Braves against the Phillies in 1971 and…
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Hunger
Trapped in the fragments of a dream, he shrugs into a jacket, meanders into the parking lot behind his condo, sleep-sentience like tingling fingers keeping him awake. An ochre moon slides across the night, gilding a mountain lion on the slope before him, head turning as she combs the air for scent. For food,…
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The Theological Imperative at Root in the Culture of Black Lives Matter
Air is a ubiquitous substance. Walking around a house, running through a park, or sitting outside air billows through our lungs without notice or cause. This air, however, has been slowly heating up. Like a lobster before dinner, the soft simmer has become a deadly boil. Coronavirus has choked the lungs of over 13,000 Americans.…
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Joy
I showed my student a photograph of you, Dad, and asked, “What do you see?” He studied the old black-and-white: you in a well-cut summer suit, hands on your lap, light socks and polished shoes— and said, “I see a man who wants to have fun”— not the dutiful school principal I knew, but hands…
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Santa Fe
Trembling aspens in the Sangres blush amber, Marking the death of summer yet resplendent and Witness to my sadness. The cottonwoods a flinty-gold lining the Rio Grande On the road to Taos the air smoke-scented with roasting piñons. I am here but lost somehow. The winds from the Rockies hum and wail to…
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Nine-Square Xylophone
Instead of an unhinged lunatic you may glimpse a punctured soul-a mere human being like you. — Shannon Love It was 5:30pm on the District Line at South Kensington station in London and thousands of tired bodies loaded themselves onto the Underground. Like tightly packed mackerel in a tin can, we could not wedge another body onto…
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Nature’s Lasting Lesson
The Intuition of Interconnection Nature replicates itself. Branching trees mirror tributaries in river networks, which reflect veering veins beneath our skin or forked lightning bolts under humid heat. The golden ratio measures the symmetry of pinecones, seashells, the human face, and hurricanes with the atmospheric force of circular replication. Our eyes, our most vulnerable portals,…
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Dens of our Grandfathers
Holy colors — deep autumn orange and yellows and reds. I can imagine strapping a crown of twigs to my head, and a mask for my face, and dancing the round dances through fields pregnant with corn and soybeans, until I collapse roadside in spent, orgasmic satiation. A dance of submission, of humble, beseeching desperation…
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John F. Kennedy’s Vision Revisited
Fifty-seven years ago, as a college freshmen, I was standing with friends outside my history class when we heard that President Kennedy had been assassinated. Little did I suspect how that historical event would dramatically change my life. A few years later I would spend a year being shot at in Vietnam. I would discover…
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OBIE COASTER DOODLELOO
Each time the voice says, like echoing from a godly tin can: ‘THERE is a TRAIN APPROACHING the LOCAL track’, I feel the urge to jump. I have lived in NYC for five months and have never done it, but I still leap back from the line, yellow and bumpy like candy buttons, just…
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Hope
I think of the deadening grass, brown. Full of November. How it lays thick and straight as a thatched roof arching down toward the creek. The sort of roof I marveled over in a book that showed cutaways of castles and homes people lived in centuries ago, when everything was handmade and at least as…
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Moonlight
Phase 8 You had seen better days, that was for sure–nose bent, eyes bore bruises and you had forgotten how to smile. Wrinkled hands clasped a wrinkled heart as faded eyes gave your face a sickly presence. I asked your faded eyes again, “Remember? Don’t you remember?” Remember the good memories…at our favorite place to…