Month: November 2024

the low wool clouds that burned blood red in the sunset changed in the darkening, metamorphed, translated, essentially evaporated into solid crystals gems that combined into fat flakes that we parochial kids in Winter Buffalo...

didn’t close screendoor a ghost moth of hummingbird size now circle ceiling light

Walk with just a little sway in their orange hips, tapping out “Freedom!” on an overcast day in the Tsavo savannah where I once walked, long before I knew much beyond how to make a mean marinera sauce for pennies. Now what do I...

So many ways to fool ourselves: cheap ice cream at midnight. Stuffing too much into dryers, trash bags, or explanations. Hitting the send button too quickly. Forgetting to read the room, the text, the heart you so foolishly...

for Forest It was dark when the baby’s head, close to the base of my spine, dropped enough to start labor. I knew how this would go. I knew nothing except the pain contracting, expanding between the window and wild where I sat...

I return to the three-year-old I was visiting the great-grandmother at her shack at the side of train tracks. She was ancient as soured Lysol and crumbling newpapers, her face so tired it could hardly hold up her eyes. My...

Blacker than ebony he is, blacker than a winter night. If night is black, he is blacker – a shadow in the darkness. And he lives beneath his own black cloud – a word-cloud of old cliches and unforgiving slurs that we have given...

Broken pots – sometimes smashed to small fragments – may look beyond repair, but with patience and care the sherds can be reassembled by experts and, once reconstructed, they often give a glimpse of the past. When they are...

Buy your bow before you build your house: Would you be known as a bowman or a builder? Hold your bow tightly, but not too much so: Do not be negligent or excessive in all that you do. String your bow quickly: Life does not wait...

I hunt the wild poetry at the poetry preserves, places where I may sit quiet as a sleeping kitten, but then, Wham! a feral poem pounces and twists me in its paws until verse shoots freely through my pen. I lust after these...

As I read the latest news of Barcelona, nostalgia envisions evening strolls along Las Ramblas, noontime thwarting pickpockets with flashing hands, penning poems beneath El Mirador de Colom at the feet of the bringer-of-plagues...