Rootwork
It has been, now, thirteen years since I married Herbert Maxwell Cooper. We married on a warm day in late March — a wonderful day without a single drop of rain. I still have one of our invitations, I believe: Herbert and Carolyn, March 31, 1939. Together forever. We took our honeymoon in Jacksonville, Florida, and then we returned to the house Herbert had purchased not a year before in Savannah. I remember mornings filled with sunshine and bacon frying on the stove; afternoons sipping iced tea on the porch with my friends, most of whom were also getting married at that time; dinners with...
Read MoreHalloween Hell
When my twins are almost six, they appear delightfully normal in our Halloween photos. Samantha, an impish Raggedy Ann, wears a red yarn wig; her lips are cherry red, and there are matching red spots on each of her round cheeks. She smiles exuberantly, showing off her missing front tooth. Her hazel eyes sparkle in anticipation of Tootsie Pops, Starbursts, and all of the candy she will bring home and beg to eat immediately. In contrast, Matthew is dressed as the Grim Reaper, holding a plastic scythe menacingly in one hand. His other hand grasps the death mask he removed because he was too...
Read MoreFeatured Works: Week of Sept. 29 (Early Fall)
In the Northern Hemisphere, as the first days of fall seamlessly blend warm summery sun with bright leaves, we present two poems using nature to talk about transitions. Joanna M. Weston’s poem, “These Sons,” gives a wistful farewell to summer. Lyn Lifshin’s poem, “Drifting,” uses milkweed to symbolize both change and...
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 MoreThese Sons
deep waves rise and fall as they breathe they hear winds lift spume from salt know the cry of terns lifting the horizon and yet and yet they walk the shore pick sea shells run rope through hands yearn for tiller and rise of tide
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