A New Language
Now the sounds twist in your ears, all the verbs wrong—present and you tensed in the past, no word for future, tomorrow. How to translate this plainest hour, grief’s land mines plotted across the hours’ winter fields, ambush planted under every step. Some days, a journey. Some nights, a fight through foreign dreams. One breath, one word at a time, here, now, yes. A phrasebook, color-coded. One jay in the pine, turning blue away from gravity, into a jewel. A bench where the fountain mutters and children laugh from the swings. It flashes back to you in short bits, in...
Read MoreHaiga
Text-only version: fluorescent bulbs mock the snow saying here is the sun to apartment flowers
Read MoreWild Violet Featured Works: Week of March 2 (Personal History)
As much of the world waits for spring, gather in close and listen to some personal stories about the lives of this week’s contributors. Lyn Lifshin’s poem, “Rexall’s, Middlebury,” a familiar location evokes complex family memories. John C. Weil’s poem, “The Sign,” recalls a formative moment from childhood when one of society’s ugly truths was revealed. In the essay “That One Pitch,” John C. Williams relates a richly-detailed story of an underdog...
Read MoreThat One Pitch
The author’s father is in the top row, to the right of the man in the hat In late August of 1957, my father took me on a trip to visit his home town of Nanaimo in British Columbia. We stayed in the Plaza Hotel, where, almost a half century earlier, he’d been a bellhop, before going to work in the coal mines. On our first morning, just after breakfast, my father took me on a walking tour of Nanaimo Harbor. We stopped at the Bastion, a fortress constructed in 1853 by the Hudson Bay Company to protect their coal mining interests on Vancouver Island. My father pointed out that...
Read MoreThe Sign
We were on a road trip in a blue station wagon through the oppressive heat and the barrage of windshield bugs of the southern states. I played with toy soldiers in the back where I bounced around with the luggage. Dad saw the rest stop up ahead, a Howard Johnson’s advertising 24 flavors of ice cream, so we pulled into the lot. I ran ahead to the lobby bathrooms and started to push through the door of the men’s room when a big hand grabbed me by my collar and yanked me back hard. “Not that one, boy,” the man said gruffly. I looked up thinking I had...
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