Love & Danger
The bare garden in spring always feels like a stranger’s. Like the last sentence in a book. Its path circles ground I have tended each season of my life. Have I only dreamed that I know how things grow? Then the dreams… Read more →
Inhale the Vapors
Overgrowth
People say water off a duck’s back,
but this duck is shiny with wet. Paddling, lifts a wing, shows a stripe of blue. She dips her face into the lake, lifts it up shining— beak dribbling—and all down her throat is wet, and all down her breast, that proud front pushing ripples out and out, whose curve is her muscle. That open mountain, that expansion, that inbreath,… Read more →
The Absence of Shoulders
His daughter, the artist, wrote a book in colored scribble. She was scribble-age. She sat on a stool and tried not to fall off. As a politician, he explained that negotiating was the same as re-negotiating. He walked backwards in the nursing home. The staff nudged him. He had a new respect for handrails. One day he fell over. Tall… Read more →
A Walk in the Woods
Oak pollen and filtered sunshine. That’s the smell wafting in through open windows as I loll on the couch slack-jawed, chain-reading library books with one hand and licking Tootsie Roll Pops with the other. It’s the summer between second and third grade; beautiful June day in my house in the middle of the Wisconsin woods, 75 degrees, all alone, parents… Read more →
Trapped in This Cement Husk
On the Edge
(Untitled)
Is this Victory?
It feels like whoever lives here never moved in. Like a bare bulb switched on in a vacant back room. Like a portrait of a stranger hung on an otherwise blank box of walls. We all live some days like a body with no head and others like a head with no body. Where do… Read more →