Category: Literature

One of my friends told me he’d seen a refrigerator magnet that read, PARENTING; THE FIRST 40 YEARS ARE THE HARDEST. Here’s a fine poem about parenthood, and about letting go of children, by Chana Bloch, who lives in Berkeley, California. Through a Glass On the crown of his head where the fontanelle pulsed between […]

A still-hidden village high atop a Smoky ridge took a name today, designed and lauded by a triumvirate: the local preacher, the town’s one cop, and a housewife whose husband plows the road down to Pigeon Forge. Hear the result of a single session of sweet tea and scratch pads and a great county nod […]

I visit my daughter for thirty minutes every week for seventeen weeks. She sits across the steel table, all ten earrings gone. Says she’s fine, didn’t know women could snore. Says she’ll never eat bologna again, ever. She gets out for school, otherwise draws. Today she gives me a picture of psychedelic rectangles, asks for […]

When I drape your pants over an easy chair, a key chain from Gene’s Gentlemen’s Club falls from one of the pockets. Where did you get this? How should I know? The other night you rode in a limousine with the men from the assisted living wing to see an exotic dancers’ stage and floor […]

Lorine your little House no wonder you wrote short no more than tiny paper scraps fit pocket house as Rock rose – rock paper scissors floods of words to pocket trickles scissors cut paper paper covered Rock paper won – words rowed out

Let’s not think of the car with no brakes at all. Or the Studebaker the color of the dawning of a very bad day, followed across Utah by the blue cloud of its oil habit. Let’s not think of its demise in the cold of Colorado winter. Let’s not think of the crashes in the […]

Her husband was no worse than an umbrella: useful in bad weather but ungainly at cocktail parties. Or he was her purse: useful for carrying things but more than once forgotten when she left the house. She fell in love with post office police sketches, the minor league mascot and his oversized foam mustache. Alexander […]

We sit on the steps of the hospital; it’s three a.m. and no one else is in sight. We joke about Yamaha Kawasaki, if it’s a boy. Stephanie if a girl. Our heads are close in concentration. There is time between the flow of waters and the hours to come of contractions. A week before, […]

Jane is a divorced single parent raising two on Kraft and Oscar Mayer See Jane Work. Work Jane, Work! Dick lives with his partner Tim and he doesn’t tell Mother See Dick Run. Run Dick, Run! Puff contracted feline diabetes from WalMart kitty chow made in China See Puff Drink. Drink Puff, Drink! Spot got […]

What would I wear if I were sad? he asks. Coming to breakfast for instance, with my loss still fresh? You, gone, inexplicably, and the silence ? Another challenge. I didn’t know that lepidopterists played games. No Nabokov, he – a manic, willowy boy, already bent from peering. I’d been captivated by his intensity his […]

If I get someday and I do do get someday and any number of gorgeousing gorgeousful days, then I’ll sing me a summer time feast of dimension, tend throbs of much blissing, and I’ll hold with it then and stay round round the march wheel and play past the kenning and say-o the good things that should all be said.

Blood Blackened Boards The ladies of the Restoration Association replaced The parlor floor of Fredricksburg’s Kenmore Plantation During the 1920s when the preservation began, The guide, a genteel lady with softly graying hair, Told our assembled tour group. As the room had been used as a Civil War surgery, The boards had been stained dark […]

  In our busy times, the briefest pause to express a little interest in the natural world is praiseworthy. Most of us spend our time thinking about other people, and scarcely any time thinking about other creatures. I recently co-edited an anthology of poems about birds, and we looked through lots of books and magazines, […]