Low lying clouds are stifling street sounds. Cars, absent from driveways, front doors stay shut, blackout screens cling to the home fronts. Town grows more silent, plainer. An engine revs somewhere beyond a slate grey roof top. Or, someone is...
A shriveled boy appeared in my backyard the night I wanted to escape, crawling naked from the doghouse like he’d lived there all along, oblivious to the cold. His skin wrinkled everywhere but his forehead, where it stretched across his skull...
A winter storm makes land at dawn. Surging seas. Valley snow down to 100 feet. Schools already closed. Here’s to one more day before brutal snow shuts my garden down and sends me fireside. Time, at last, to thaw out tired limbs and doze without bark...
Laura watched the girl pushing a housekeeping cart from cabin to cabin all morning. She’d sweep the porches, shutter the windows, and turn the heavy pine porch chairs upside down. When she’d finish a cabin she’d slouch over the porch railing...
Cold grey and beautiful send me off to tame the tigers of you to draw the punctured line of you with the funny stink and the greedy breath of you the old man’s mouth of you Cold never black and beautiful like life for I see the rising planes...
From time to time the young men who were brothers would look up at one another and say without words the obvious words which their eyes betrayed and then up the winding road ending in a graveyard. In the misted evening, a slow procession followed...
We sat up in bed, suddenly awake—Ann first, then Brian a moment after—and we looked at the green clockface. 2:46 am again. We waited, floating in a warm fog, and listened to our breaths like a whispered call-and-response beneath the creak of the...
It would have been your birthday— ominous, anticipating. I remembered fingering the scratched gold wedding ring you left behind. Mama slipped it on my finger before I left her too— a parting gift. I woke to New England pines looming behind an...
I lived in a house, a house that was wide with heat and dark Kona coffee slumbering in ceramic pot— moon on paper-walls yellowed into the cracks, whose ivy vines breathed tiny hopes from their fringed calligraphy— I stood with my back to the cuff of...
The blind man sits on his stoop listening to the jets whining over the river and the gurgling of water as it filters through oyster-laden rocks. He lights his pipe and he listens to the distant drone of ships returning or going out to kill people...
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