In 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...
Read MoreWild Violet Featured Works: Week of Feb. 10 (Love)
In honor of Valentine’s Day, this week we are publishing a series of pieces depicting the many forms of love. In the flash fiction piece by Hank Kirton, “The Incredible Melting Man,” an awkward man navigates the essential first step to love: communication. Larissa Lytwyn’s flash fiction piece, “Waiting for Signs,” compares unrequited love with religion. Sara Norja’s poem, “Helsinki Love Song,” celebrates the emotion produced by a place. David Filer’s poem, “Hands,” extols the life experiences that can lead to true love,...
Read MoreA Fable
Once there was a bird. She was the finest of birds. She was all of the things that make birds desirable to us mere humans. She was quick-witted. She loved to laugh. She was kind beyond kindness. She was strong, yet delicate. Even though her heart had been wounded, she found a way to rise above. Her beauty, obvious on the outside, had its origin from within. In short, she was a bird among birds. She was one to be recognized on her own merits. She didn’t sing very much, for even though she had a wonderful voice, she had been told that it wasn’t acceptable. One day a weary traveler...
Read MoreThe Artist
My little son draws an ocean and above it prehistoric-looking birds. A ship with stick figure men in hats on deck. A sun with lines of heat spoking out. There is a small clump of land, an island, and on it a single palm tree. He adds one, then a second coconut which has fallen on sand. Now nineteen he sits beside me in the car, staring out the window while we drive to college. He wants to be an actor but there’s no room in my skull’s theater. He can’t see behind my forehead the big screen where he stars, a six year old sitting at the table with a father recently divorced who writes...
Read MoreTesseract: A Parent’s Guide to Time Travel
(with thanks to Madeleine L’Engle) A tesseract, you may recall, acts like a wrinkle in time Cinching together now and long ago or Right this minute and decades hence Like a pleat, a hem Or a cloth swept from the table All whorls and fluting, rapidly compressed. It’s what they nowadays would call a wormhole And say you need a warp drive to approach. But parents generate them just by being: Seed them with our breath Spark them with our glance Roil spacetime’s fabric with our every step. You know it from yourself: How the smell of chlorine can transport you To those mornings...
Read MoreHands
photo by Philipp Weissenbacher “The Kiss” by Auguste Rodin in the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek (for Verlena Orr) I would rather kiss hands. Hands have done everything: been cold and burned; caressed and braced against a fall. Hands are dangerous: have become fists, instinctively; gripped knives in anger, released bombs; hands have felt pulse and pressed desperately against wounds. Hands have worn paint, grease, the pungency of garlic, scent of fresh sex. Hands have been hidden in pockets, left awkwardly exposed. Hands have bathed children, lowered the dead. Hands have scars where they...
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