Before it was fire, a car accident, a plane crash en route to Australia made sense to invest with adrenaline, pounding heartbeat, with personal sweat and misguided belief. My worries fed upon distant statistics, remote possibility, apocalyptic, until they approached me where the street ends and were reintroduced as my long-lost friends… Continue reading Pandemic VII: Before and After
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My Granddaughter’s Thoughts When She Concentrates
Some arrive with soft wing flaps alighting on her ivory cheek, some are shadows by her mouth that creep to where she bites her lip. Others come on pink toe shoes and pas de chat with her tilting chin, or hide behind her squeezed eyelids and wait for blinking, to escape. … Continue reading My Granddaughter’s Thoughts When She Concentrates
To Dwell in the Small Safety
of a dog's heart beat a brown bird's song a bench in the sun like a sigh to float on a felt wing flap when a dove grays along a collection of mornings untouched by doom the quiet shrine of an afternoon the laughter of leaves in a sylvan wind… Continue reading To Dwell in the Small Safety
Pandemic III: I Dreamed the Pandemic Was Purged
when a storm surged for days off the Mexican Coast and finally breached California shores Old Testament style and flushed our streets with epic amounts of spring clean rain. In the morning epidemiologists reported the virus was last seen in filmy rivers jumping the curbs in San Diego. Oceanographers are saying this event makes history… Continue reading Pandemic III: I Dreamed the Pandemic Was Purged
Despite the Mess of Us All
Today it isn't just the fresh marsh grass that inspires me, each blade bent and turned to glass polished by a quiet rain, or the clouds that race to stay ahead of wind's invisible paintbrush, always loath to strike a pose and every day a masterpiece. It's also the sight of a nest of webs,… Continue reading Despite the Mess of Us All
Pandemic II: Dreams in the Time of COVID-19
My first three teeth fell out last night at Sarah's fortieth birthday party and I mistook them for pebbles or seashells in my jaw and shored them underneath my tongue. I spit them out in two pink flowered paper towels that danced in the powder room and— the sink handed me two more— returned for… Continue reading Pandemic II: Dreams in the Time of COVID-19
A Partner in Poetry?
I can’t read his words, but because of the way they justify left and stagger at right I think that the stranger I see every morning at Starbucks might be a poet like me. This much I know from two tables away: He doesn't seem to measure the meter with fingers that count on the… Continue reading A Partner in Poetry?
To the Whale That Swims Beside Me
Your eye's an aperture to the unnamed and far away from its orphaned twin, so what should I choose to receive my appeal— the fathomless one, or the one on the left? Never mind. Daylight has fled like minnows, the white of your eye is a gibbous moon that’s taking in the foolishness of… Continue reading To the Whale That Swims Beside Me
A Young Girl’s Blonde Hair
In sunlight it’s prairie grass rippled by a wind, a meadow rill that tumbles past to yellow’s end. A whisper of secrets shared with cheeks and face or captured in a braid, her hair crocheted like lace. At night it spills across her brow, her frothy mane bubbling and breathy, somehow intoxicating. Someday begging to… Continue reading A Young Girl’s Blonde Hair
Only in San Diego
it tapped at my memory two-stepped on my brain galloped on the rooftop sprinted down a drain sometimes a calliope other times a train seeped into my nightmare dallied with my dream hammered on the skylight pushed me to a scream until i figured what it was i might be hearing rain then it seemed… Continue reading Only in San Diego