Welcome to The RavensPerch

My mother would eat cottage cheese and fruit —berries or a cut up apple—for lunch. Or a bran muffin with yogurt. She liked grapefruit, had special spoons for sectioning, saved the peels to dry and candy. Saved all those cottage cheese containers. Saved the letters we...

Let us praise the heart, how it persists despite fluster. Our rugged heart, broken and healed many times over, and yet its daily work continues. Today is a day for cleaning out the garden bed. Already we wake in darkness, wrapped in November, our heartbeat buried...

My father comes every day, looks through the glass at me, in the incubator, so we can be together in our aloneness, later holds me in the palm of his hand where I gaze into his blue eyes, though I have no word for it. Our ocean a swimming pool, in the six and unders,...

The black walnut tree stands naked against an unseasonably blue sky. Migrating birds gone south, we are left with this: a rake, a shovel, a shift in time. Fig leaves, yesterday drooping like surrender flags, drop all at once, paper the sidewalk several layers thick....

Yes, I do wonder if there is some sort of consciousness after we are gone. And as I just revisited a photo on my Facebook page of a long-time friend named Ray who passed away around three years ago, I’m wondering if he has any sort of awareness and longing to still be...

Pulling into my driveway about 30 seconds before Ester— my 97-year-old neighbor—comes up pushing a basket with a grocery bag inside, I get out of my car and start a little conversation with her, and around two minutes in, she points to my car and says with a smile,...

Ah mighty beloved Mississippi, first glimpsed flashing past in newly green youth. Your aubergine waters flex curvaceous lithe muscles, like a sylvan sinuous snake, Moving, ever moving, to the sea. Standing I, now on precipice of beyond fragile flickering. Dappled...

(In remembrance of Henry Reed’s poems about WWII 1914 -1986. And for my many relatives who have served in the armed forces) Identity’s DNA fragments, swirling spirals of life shape-shift into naming And claiming of parts. Miasma, elixir, madness, Is this my destiny?...

A whisper of saffron a flash of burgundy corded together spirit. The monks are walking A fine line along a freeway The monks are walking. From Austin to Washington 2,300 miles, foot by foot sneakers slide, bare feet slap. Whisper the monks are walking a fine line on...

A large hungry beast, lurking shadows stealthily wait to pounce. A split second only you let down your guard. The silent stalker waits, it is eerily silent like covid/Floyd times. Icy snow sparkle white streets empty. Even the wind has ceased to shriek. Heavy like the...

after midnight a lone silence mellow soft light and floral aroma beneath soft silk blanket on satin-shine pillow slumbers into destiny a long love memory this tranquil seclusion feels like the very next moment in our history of time   Richard Eric Johnson lives...

There is a window you could look into To a door you could walk through To a crack in the night where you could disappear To the streets Where the black carpet is rolled out To take you turn after turn By the houses with the closed gates And the dangling keys And when...