Violet Jelly
picking the leaves Monday early in a cool rain huddled in wet sweatshirts. Hours in the grey, knees and fingers numb. Our skin smells of violets while they soak in the red pan overnight till we boil the green. Then the pectin turns them lilac. We pour them into glass, amethyst the sun comes thru on the window after...
Read MoreEach Night She is Like a Drowning Nymph
like a woman pulled out of the river and dressed in warm clothes, her lips parted. The twist of words that will keep blood flowing thru her body. She could be a woman close to drowning, reeled in with eels and sea weed, fins, like Rapunzel shimmying to freedom, her own hair, her words a rope to...
Read MoreThe Pearls
An engagement present from my husband’s parents. Shoved in a drawer like small eggs waiting to hatch, forgotten. They seemed like something in a high school photograph. I’d have preferred a large wrought iron pendant, beads that caught the sun. Pearls were for them and I was always only a visitor, tho he said he wished I’d call him Dad. Sam was all I could get out. It was hard to throw my arms around him, to bubble and kiss. And not just because they thought me a hippie, a witch, thought I took their son’s car and stamps and coin collections. Pearls wouldn’t...
Read MoreDrifting
things I have and don’t have come from this moving between people like smoke. I’ve been waiting the way milkweed I brought inside two years ago stays suspended, hair in the wind it seems to float, even its black seeds don’t pull it down tho you don’t under stand how any thing could stay that way so long
Read MoreIn Rexall’s, Middlebury
the dark booth held us like a cove. My mother put on high heels and lipstick. Fruit parfait in glasses, a sweetness. A comfort to eaves drop on the others talking. My mother put on high heels and lipstick. My father never cared if we had a real house where my sister and I wouldn’t be ashamed to bring friends. In the dark of the booth, I could imagine, someday, being a beauty My father never cared if we had a real house. My mother never wanted to come back to this town she eloped to escape. She went out with realtors for 15...
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