The Turn
Though my mother is long dead, my sister estranged, I cannot account for the specter. After over forty years, the image, the memory returns to me lately, haunting my afternoon routine, all its edges garishly distinct. The turn began at the end of summer, nineteen-seventy- two or three, the last tubing and camping trip with the Buskirk and Weaver kids, The Caves at Millwood, along the muddy Kokosing River. After one too many days of fun, fun, fun, of hotdogs and marshmallows, hair and tee shirts reeking of smoke, sticky nights in rank sleeping bags, no showers, no television, the mighty,...
Read MoreShe Knew
Although well-versed in leafy academe, she knew they helped her not at all, those skills — to parse, to rhyme a scheme, to sketch a plot, to hear the dying fall of scribbled footsteps echoing in the growing gloom. Though of an age meetly deemed maturing, she knew that mice-like lines which grow along the very bottom of a page signified, at last, quite next to naught; that, frail or strong, old age should rightly rage through the lengthening night, should strive to flame and flare and cut the darkness clean to filaments of light. Though learned in the very rare and rarefied imaginings...
Read MoreAhab’s Crew
— Boarding School, 1980 October flares in western PA. In rumpled uniforms boys mock each other around the oak table, two chairs lean daringly on back legs. The schoolmaster shows up late on black mornings, the beret tipped wide on his high forehead and a tweed jacket dangling from his hunched shoulder. Twice he clears his throat, a voice more trusted than their own fathers, before reading out loud from Moby Dick. Thin smoke rises from the hot ember at his fingertips. Half-listening, they slouch with their hair hurling round their heads, look up at his moving lips, pausing...
Read MoreInjured Shadow (v3)
In nakedness of life moves this male shadow worn out dark clothes, ill fitted in distress, holes in his socks, stretches, shows up in your small neighborhood, embarrassed, walks pastime naked with a limb in open landscape space— damn those worn out black stockings. He bends down prays for dawn, bright sun. Hear Michael reading his own...
Read MoreWildflowering
Pock-marked—yet her face is perfection, (or close enough for the reach of praise) each enlarged pore, pit a star in the banner weaving across sleek cheeks below the hunter eyes that pay no serious attention to past struggles with oil, hormones, and stress, but stake the opposing orbs that must notice the pinprick fields, blooms, before caught above, beyond the necessary...
Read MoreWho I Wanted to Be
Memory arises from a puckered, bent photo of that day. My cousin with her rich, sophisticated family enter our shack, the abomination of my stifled life. We do not have enough chairs. Children are left to stand or crouch near the screen door. I peek through a flimsy curtain hanging as a door to my tiny room, large enough for only a bunk and a box for my folded clothes. My cousin is eighteen. She wears a light blue linen dress with a peter pan collar, ankle socks and saddle shoes. She twists the ringlets at her shoulder. Her lavender scent reaches me as if from another world where I...
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