A Gift Preacher Williams waited till dusk before he set off in his old Toyota because he didn’t want to be seen. He even drove the last mile without headlights fearing unreasonably that he might be followed. When the road ended, he parked and sat, rolling down the car window, begging for a breeze to … Continue reading A Gift
On April Fool’s Day, Tom thought it would be funny to replace the sugar in the sugar bowl with salt, and yeah, it was pretty funny to see the sour look on his Mom’s face when she took her first sip of coffee that morning. But just to spite him, I guess, she didn’t say … Continue reading No Sugar Added
A special poem for Valentine's Day! Love is an avocadoshaped like the human heart,and the human heartis a pumpthat sends the blood reelingin ways gravity alonecannot do.But the human heart is also a metaphorfor the depth of human emotion andfor something more that cannot beexpressed directlyand so we callon this poor overworkedhuman organand on avocadosto … Continue reading Love is an Avocado
Summer rerun time: enjoy!! Written with my Thursday night group with the prompts: bulgaricus, in an orange room, why is she crying, the farm, he palmed his meds, there is no one there, hey baby, they were new, Kansas, healing, big medicine, Hank 25 years ago, they were young, is it all a sham, poppies like … Continue reading An Orange Room On a Blue Planet
One day my notebook leapt out of my back pack while I was searching for my keys. It lay on the sidewalk watching foot traffic and pigeons, frustrated that I had left it alone without a pen. Finally notebook crawled into a coffee house and eavesdropped on office clerks, legislators and students. Using coffee in … Continue reading Vibrations
Resisting Every Inch of the Way Written with my Thursday night group with the prompts: dates with nothing in them, a gun fighter and a bag of gold, resisting every inch of the way, everything will be all right, comfortable being, pipe dream, she wondered about the moment, illegal immigrant, a small squeak, everything is … Continue reading Resisting Every Inch of the Way
One more poem of mine to finish up National Poetry Month Tonight you sit on the front steps facing south beckoning me with your dry lips your moist fingers. I am already here but I am still and you do not recognize me. I press against your skin, a sweaty companion: I am hot and … Continue reading Delta Breeze
A year ago Jean had a love affair with a man who moiled the river. He was a lanky man, with a day’s growth of stubbly dark brown beard on his ruddy cheeks, a man with an easy laugh. He’d come from a different era, a ghost from the gold rush, whom Jean had met in the … Continue reading Allow the Magic
I first wrote and published this piece several years ago when Barack Obama was president and John Boehner was speaker of the house, and we were in the midst of a federal government shut-down. It was a time of great anxiety, partisanship and divisiveness. Things being what they are, I decided the beginning of this … Continue reading A New Year Prayer for Healing Division
We’ve all been “sheltering” now, to one degree or another, for seven and a half months. Initially I was both alarmed and secretly pleased—because suddenly I could be my introvert self without apology. My biggest fear was that the whole thing would end too soon—before I completed the half-finished novel I’d been sitting on for the past … Continue reading Sheltering, Part 4
