Author: admin

It’s a hot and humid afternoon the trees buzz with invisible insects and sprinklers with their fat silver fans sway slowly back and forth over parched lawns. The last time I saw you I knew it wouldn’t be long. Your words drifted...

Her name is Maggie Elizabeth, but she’s Aunt Dixie to us, a reference to her Carolina roots. An Appalachian tide pool still flows through her even though she’s lived most of her life just shy of Lake Ontario’s shores. She’s home...

My doctors call my lungs an impassable sea. Kidneys a dam from which nothing flows. No food, no words pass my lips. I look to the moment when all I am isn’t. Amid the closing fog, I hear one of my sisters say, “Can’t you put in...

Each snowflake, a white, lacy hole in the air, a winter blossom falling from a tree of sky, accumulates on the driveway. I stare out of the living room window at weather turning landscape into a bride’s gown. Behind me,...

A movie-star blond, he thinks every time she comes in for a cut. Natural, hanging straight to mid-back, a golden rainfall. Six inches of rain a year, he guesses. He’s known every thread, every inch as intimately as his own,...

1. My father at the piano composing. I, a boy not yet three, imagining all fathers composers. Surprised to find otherwise. That all fathers don’t sing. Or stay home and write songs. Or plant black dots in a thicket of black...

When the blackbirds fly to north women watch from kitchen windows above their good-meal-cluttered sinks and know the sun on glossy feathers tells a story far past soap. They tuck long skirts above smooth boots, pin back their...

This afternoon, two young men carry furniture into the kitchen, so they can pry up living room carpet. They fold to their knees, both men slipping a tack remover beneath the rug. Lumps and wrinkles have buckled broadloom into a...

If somewhere in the violet depths of dusk a warbling vireo sings, reassess the blasphemy of this time and know you are not lost, though the race may well be. Settle next the echoes of the wood thrush. Let silence between notes...