The tendons in her hands are creased as the sharp pleats in a paper fan, her fingers bent as a red king crab. Again and again she pushes the silk under the foot of a sewing machine until it flows on the other side sleek as an emerald waterfall. Outside, quiet river boats slip across… Continue reading Old Seamstress in Bangkok
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Gift from a Song Sparrow
Perhaps I tend to brood, to overthink a sparrow dying on the glass today— though l admit it took my breath away to find his stiffened body on the deck. But perhaps he was a gift from the sky— an emissary dressed in sparrow brown with broken neck and feet curling down but an urgent… Continue reading Gift from a Song Sparrow
Serial Worrier
“I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.” -Mark Twain Maybe a fire is headed my way— the curious cloud that seems… Continue reading Serial Worrier
To a Tiny Miracle, Found
The garden was leviathan no doubt when seen through your baby lizard eyes, with leaves the length of galleons afloat in the jacuzzi, a sea by its size. You chose to take sudden soundless flight into the humid draw of depths too deep, all one-plus inches of you, in breathless night and silent as a… Continue reading To a Tiny Miracle, Found
Wings into Glass: The Yellow Warbler, Part II
Please don’t mourn or pity my brief hold on this earth, like something frail or fine. When I’m buried, say this life of mine was more than striking glass and falling gold. My home was at the edges of the sky where time was as carefree as a breeze. And I became the envy… Continue reading Wings into Glass: The Yellow Warbler, Part II
One Thing He Misses, from Life in a Prison
He doesn’t miss sameness. No, not the sameness. The sameness of lapping the gravel track in ellipses to nowhere for 3,000 days, the same treeless yard, the same bleachers, faceless, the same conversation each day and each week. Not frigid concrete and pseudo brick walls, the cinder block shelves in a make-shift greenhouse. The… Continue reading One Thing He Misses, from Life in a Prison
Sonnet for the Lost Woods
Who pauses to pay homage to the trees buried in a concrete cemetery— those that were a leafy sanctuary brought--by civilization--to its knees? Where were the mourners, when the forests died— the noble warriors mankind didn’t save? No flags or flowers placed upon their graves, no one recited last rites; no one cried. Departed souls,… Continue reading Sonnet for the Lost Woods
After the Climate Changes
A hundred thousand years—what will they find? After lapping hungry at our feet the creeping seas rise, and then retreat. Will humankind be fossil over time? What traces from the life of our tribe-- like ancient middens buried in sandstone with hidden bits of pottery and bone-- what part of modern man survives the tides?… Continue reading After the Climate Changes
The Ghost of Cancer Past
There's the smile we recognize-- but as we're greeting him we see exhaustion in his eyes where hope is stretched thin, the transformation to a man who doesn't fill his skin. They're gone, he convinces us— all the lung tumors. New at believing wellness isn't just a rumor— his eyes beg us, like a child… Continue reading The Ghost of Cancer Past
Love Song
Let us wander through the wood, entwine our hands forever— hearts as weightless as a breeze, a path that wanders endlessly, and gathers us together. Our future broad as sky, and brilliant as a moonlit dream, and time is but the whispered sound of aspen leaves that flutter down, the murmur of a stream. And… Continue reading Love Song