When my father was seventy-four and I was no longer a girl that cowered, skirting the edge of the room, I asked him to travel back to his childhood, the landscape he’d banished for years. He became an Amish boy in suspenders, hitching the horse to the buggy, driving Delaware’s back country roads past the
Some women resist ruin for three thousand years. The wrecking ball smashes the front closet and hall but they just keep humming and dusting the knick-knacks. Lot’s wife disobeyed, turned and looked back at what was forbidden, now she’s afraid to risk any tears, four could dissolve a salt pillar. I watched a woman sell
I cast my bread on the waters, what I’d wanted and loved shuffled off on a raft, waved, promised to call then never looked back. Sometimes grief braids a rope, crafts a cage or a prison. I set the last brick, found a noose coiled round my neck. What could I do but build a
He conjured up a crow and sent it like a curse, cloaked in black, raven-lit, it settled on her shoulder. Who could have guessed a crow could save, it stole the poisoned bread. Now when ravens strut she counts their raucous throats as gifts that forced a turn, her winter heart borrows light, just like
Like Father’s unfinished life, the half-dressed donated stone stands in the farm’s front yard true as an oak. A traveling mason settles for pasta and peas at the family cemetery. The youngest daughter whispers Father’s name in his hairy ear like a sad girlhood secret, her tears pooling like stars in his chip-pitted cheek. Later,
In the quiet of the morning, I dig my hands into the earth, lettuce leaves stretch to the sun, garlic bulbs whisper beneath the soil. Onions peek through, a humble promise, Roma tomatoes blush with summer heat, cucumbers curl, hidden in the green. Basil stretches its arms toward the sky, while thyme and oregano weave
in springtime, the earth rumbles and the sun-kissed soil begins to stir slender leaves suddenly begin wriggling their way to the surface, eager to drink misty raindrops and bask in the balmy air and I wait, with anticipation for the sturdy stems that will rise in the days to come, sprouting their bearded petals of
This blue vase So rough to the touch Beneath my fingertips The leaves are velvet tongues Still life of zinnias Daffodils and marigolds Arrange the view On blue linen tablecloth Outside Behind the window pane Dreamscapes glisten The earth beckons Beyond the cultivated fields To chance our way Through groves of thickest darkness See the
brittle snow countless needles dropping today I knit up sad and black into a sweater would not stay folded in the drawer how can a body stitched with bone fit in this? stretched, bed’s length all night weedy symbols root in the mind in the dirt outside under snow broken nails, pins are growing into
“What you got there, ol’ man?” He raised his head and met the bloodshot eyes of the skinny guy on the neighbouring cot who had just spoken. Another junkie. Or tweaker. Or crackhead. Same difference. Like all the young ones in the shelter. He looked back down at the tattered newspaper clippings he had spilled
