Author: admin

At day’s end, the house goes quiet, and though we may stand where we were already standing, it’s no longer a mystery what might happen during this particular turn of Earth. The last light, on the side table, goes off with a turn...

After the stay-at-home order, the rains started speaking in full sentences. Fog confused exteriors with interiors. But the winds changed, as they will. The sky, cleared. I can place my armature, its long and short bones, across...

How to speak of cancer with eloquence, with calm resolve, early panic turned mellow? Realize it’s not your fault. It’s simply chance. Stop with the guesswork, that mad mental dance: If I’d not smoked, not chased that last...

My right hand knows so much— holds ledgers of history, dates, neat columns of numbers, ideas to weight the big picture. My left, dear left, holds a skittering mess, jumbled sights and sounds— like the tiny spider in the shower,...

Which is it – word or stitch? Choice flickers from line to seam. Face mask pattern, three pleats the standard, but what shape for these isolate days? What shape here for a stuttering poem – Another kind of mask, warding off...

My composer-father’s leonine bust of Beethoven glares down at me from atop the piano. My father spends, as far back as I remember, countless hours at the keyboard. It’s my turn. I’m nine. I practice for the first time the deaf...

Northern New Mexico I’m driving us along the Pecos River to Villanueva, so you can help a father in his thirties turn his imminent death into a moment of kindness. His wife is there and the three of you talk. Lethal cells stalk...

Months pass before I’d hear from him. He didn’t have to say hello. Ice tinkling in his glass said it all. Until the first day of summer, he and his birthday, which falls the second day, rarely enter my mind. He died dry at 50,...

Blessings Alphabetica, Whether given to us by the Phoenicians, Started as cuneiform, Or before that cave paintings. African drumming village au village, Bird calls on raw primitive flutes — All close the gap — Which...

Like babies We need to prone On our stomachs to add air flow A place of humility Where we can look only to the right or left And so we must believe In the above sky To really see it. Thea Schiller, a New York poet has been...