(with respect to Gabriel García Márquez) Through the glass, in the cold March breeze, flaps a neighbor’s worn flag. Distance, like these bare branches— white pine against blue sky—marks this corona, this silver ring with dark...
Read MoreAfter “Tip Toe Dancer” by Karen Marie Garrett A boy—small enough to sit on the box-like windowsill along the edge of wood lacquering the vacant second floor of Kaufman’s Hardware Store— stares across a valley of corn to the...
Read Morestand silent. Roches moutons from earth science class before her teacher got pregnant. Then teachers were demigods powerful with myth. She’s a teacher herself now and in love with a teacher who travels with her. Both know how to...
Read MoreThe game commences: Two sides compete as a checkered board lay flat under the swiftly moving pawns. Racial tension towers above them with a vile smirk across its face hosting the whole charade. The prancing fingers came out to...
Read MoreMy mother’s Hope chest said its final goodbye from the back of a Nissan Pathfinder stuffed in next to a dirty snow boot and a crumpled, Taco Bell takeout bag. It seemed an unceremonious parting if there is such a thing as...
Read MoreIt lies in a deserted patch of field, in the bowels of Eastern Europe. The face is looking up at the sky, the cold eyes that can never rest. Lenin, who said he didn’t want statues built for him, who said you can’t make an omelet...
Read MoreIt grabs its cane and begins the shuffle down the hospital corridor, but still a gentleman it wishes the new heart well, the new heart acting a bit of an ingrate dancing wildly with the staff, oblivious to its elder. The old...
Read MoreThe sunlight overwhelms the vestiges of the snow light, yet even with the clarity it’s hard to tell if the man I see is walking the dog or the dog is walking the man, though both of them seem to have affection for each other, no...
Read MoreIn the alley an empty shoe. In the sky a moon like a broken circle barely shines through the smog. A kitten sniffs a shoe, twitches, and immigrates into the oblique night. A girl gets home late. She says to her parents watching...
Read MoreThe roses lasted for days and days and days. —Alison Murchie When we bought the new house, I didn’t take the rose bush that I planted, fed, and trimmed for twenty-five years at the old house. The JFK Rose to honor that president...
Read MoreAn hour after the farmer finished baling hay, turkey vultures flocked over the field, circling high a few minutes, then descending in tighter arcs of air. Farm machinery must have killed some rabbit, opossum, or fox hiding or...
Read MoreComfort me with kumquats For I am lousy for love And allergic to apples.
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