IT IS A HUMID NIGHT in D.C. and the air feels clotted and dense, like it’s on the verge of hemorrhaging outside instead of raining. It’s sick air, damp and shameless; the perfect conditions for reminiscing. I slow my pace back to my hotel where Frannie is already waiting for me in the lobby bar … Continue reading A Dead Thing
The forest is carpeted with October. The ochre, red, and gold hold an old dog firm as he limps through the dry crackling. Horse tails swat at the last of the flies, and the geese pond hop across the county. Snow, sleet, and ice loom; sheets of white stripping the earth, blanketing the conifers. Until … Continue reading Changing Seasons
The wolves of Smyrna howl from their refuge to their timber kin by the Boundary Waters, to the coyotes beyond the fencing, to the yellow labs at the autobody shop. We humans hear it and long to answer the call like some futile response to untamed sorcery. We forage for cow pies to pick psilocybin … Continue reading Wolf Mountain Center, Central New York
Because I’m the seer deep within the tower, preferring the whip to the prayer cords, the rough wool & hard stone to the downy pillow, it’s too easy to hear it from you, such prophecies of who I am & will be — how can I believe unless an old book says my name in … Continue reading The Prophecy
She was right, you do resemble the moon. A vision. Dim light The opening of a mouth, a door, a soul I reach my fingers through your corridors “Am I interrupting?” It’s a delicate space, pink rooms filled with glass The tip of my toes trying hard not to touch them I was never one … Continue reading fans over knobs
Sean Doherty slammed the big glass door open and stormed across the lobby toward his office. “Sean?” Terry, the receptionist, looked up in surprise. “Trouble with Cramer again?” “With Cramer? Never. He’s a paragon of clienthood! A saint!” Sean threw his notebook down the hallway ahead of him and ripped off his tweed jacket. When … Continue reading Working Title
FOR A MOMENT she pictured herself living somewhere else. Somewhere far away where women fixed things in order to live… in some desert somewhere or in a war-torn town… walking home from the vegetable market with a basket balanced on her head. She was connected in some way to all of them. For a moment … Continue reading There Was A Falseness To Her Life
THE MAN BEHIND the Venetian blinds never knew whether it was sunrise or sunset. He would wake up in his leatherette armchair, or on the ratty sofa he kept for naps. He would wake up next to his soft pack of cigarettes, his pint of bourbon. He was waiting. He had been told a leggy … Continue reading Private Eye
Lincoln published poems in the Springfield paper dripping with daggers and cries in the dark Styron filled pages with treacherous weather howling tempests and horrific gray drizzle for me — it’s a dime-store black plastic mask I wore as a child on Halloween the kind with the two impractical nose holes and the … Continue reading Use Metaphors to Describe Your Depression
time slipped from our grasp and like a moony girl we clung harder to our holy texts filtering out life’s variegated strings, jaws of spit tautening in the crevices a mouth wishing only for a better pair of breasts. candles melted at windowsills the heart rolled in the earth’s slip — judgement, self-flagellation, pity — … Continue reading We Lived This Way For Years