An Asthmatic Hearing Himself Breathe
Sometimes it sounds like barn doors opening, lots of ancient wood and rusty iron creaking and cracking. Other times, it’s a shrill northeasterly wind, rattling the windows of my lungs. Then there’s that panting of the overheated dog, the rapid wheeze of an accordion playing polka. My breath is a percussion instrument. It’s all the woodwinds and occasionally, the strings. Sometimes, on the good days, I hear nothing at all. Ah the silence of it. That’s a sound...
Read MoreRight Brain Blues
These days, she drinks light, shelves those costly oils, her sable brush, the palette’s whorls—azure, cobalt, cyanine—sky piece hues, left to clot. Since the surgery, she cannot bear time vanishing, stroke by stroke. She lives to swim through twilight’s milk, to echo birds on high, larking away, to chew the new-picked April clover stem, four-leafed or not. She will not mourn her lost breasts, nor scenes she’ll never paint—finally here, as is....
Read MoreSpots
Midst purgatory’s weedfields sprouts one clover. On blinded shelves, between the pulp and pap, a dashed and stashed encryption offers sight as fortitude is found in looking over the life of Job, the context of mishap. And even the most sweat-sopped marish night about to drown you in its sea of horror dissolves in dawn: The dark defines the light. So if I’m looking at a fun-house mirror or through a curved perverted looking glass to spot a glimmer through a pane of terror of what you say shall never come to pass, it could be that you aren’t looking right. The dark of sunspots, after...
Read MoreChoices
“…if poets (often lacking God, less often lacking cats)…” – Dan Chiasson I’ve often heard that politicians own dogs and we with creative natures tend towards cats, and I wonder why. Do politicians need clear emotions, eyes filled with slavish devotion or rage on the verge of attack, while we of poetic bent have become accustomed to the blank, disinterested...
Read MoreThe Introvert Who (Almost) Ran for Town Council
I can make a difference in this town, she told friends. They were encouraging from the start, pleased by her omission of the words “I believe,” her phrasing of desire (and ambition) as fact. Yes, this was to be her time, of that they were sure. They remembered the many ways, large and small, that she had helped them, the good she had ushered into the world. How she located a shelter and then a new home for Marie, who for years had been unable to relinquish the fists and the honey tongue of Caleb. How she decorated Stefan’s studio apartment on thrift shop scavenging. As if from a...
Read MoreAt McDonald’s
An attractive employee with mussed hair pacing outside smoking a cigarette two construction workers discussing in simple Beckettesque lines the difficult old lady impossible to please with either woodworking or painting the family pulling up with the camping trailer ordering the biggest breakfasts they can get the father with two identical copies of himself all with crew cuts and turned up noses trailing along behind oh McDonald’s microcosm! I look at my reflection in your window wondering when it was I got to be so old and stupid...
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