Berkshire Manor
No-frills garden apartment complex in a west-side Tampa suburb. 1980. My favorite T-shirt is a dark blue Adidas. My clarinet is a rental. The reeds scratch the roof of my mouth. I make first chair and get two Pete Fountain LPs for Christmas. Saturday mornings are spent at Major League Lanes West. I’m trying to get strong enough to trade… Read more →
The Thing About Re-Entry
One and one-half degrees ago, I sought supplementary employment to fund death-wish extracurriculars You’ll get bored said the manager over the phone Overqualified Despite white-hot yearning for endangering my life, I like a brown goldfish in a plastic bowl too aware of its spherical condition, could not contain the exponential need to expand into myself, then outward for too long…. Read more →
Holes in the Pines as Passage
Hey Diddle Diddle
Beyond the horse barn cotton fields conceal cotton tails, jack rabbits, and a colony of lop-eared bunnies turned feral. I once released a rabbit into a park near the house I lived in while still married. I told my daughter that he’d found a new home, this Jersey Wooly who wound up with the ridiculous name of Hey Diddle Diddle…. Read more →
Ryan tells me a taillight is out.
1. when crime is embroidered on your skin at birth one must take precaution: say ‘I love you’ each time you step out because stepping in again isn’t a basic human right. shame, shame sometimes simple fixes cost more than one Black man’s life – the mechanics of this baffle… still 2. my uncle pulled into the driveway strobing red… Read more →
Field Poems from Mars on Earth
Mount Teide on the Canary Island of Tenerife is the highest peak in Spain, at 12,188 feet. And the third largest volcano in the world. It is considered active but hasn’t blown since 1909. There is an otherworldly element to it. NASA worked with Spanish aerospace experts on Teide to build a prototype for the data-gathering robot called Perseverance that… Read more →
The Sum of Us: An Elegy
We called ourselves The Crazy Cronies, old friends from the Admiral King Class of ’68, seven women, sometimes more, sometimes less. We had kids who were adults or we had no kids. We were well enough with time enough. A sweet spot four decades after graduation. We rented houses for a week East or West, shared bedrooms, shared king-sized beds…. Read more →
Suddenly
A child returning on her dad’s bike kept staring at me until I got lost in the ascending distance between us. It was another normal walk home. What was that she searched on my body. Did I startle her the way sidewalk giving way to the wilderness startled me a few moments ago. The shallow land covered by shrubs bowed… Read more →
Balancing Act
Rough. This carpet isn’t mine and I know it through my palms. There’s nothing subtle about my ankles popping. I love so many. I can feel my oily, red heart. My clammy, cold skin roughing up an organ’s edge. Sometimes it’s not that I’m too weak to hold. It’s the holding itself that’s questionable. Reposition. It doesn’t make sense. Why… Read more →