At Miss Hooker’s funeral I’ll fall inlove with her all over again, red hairand green eyes and freckles and her eyes closedlike they used to be when she recitedthe Lord’s Prayer at the end of SundaySchool class and I peeked to see how she looked with them closed, maybe asleepContinue Reading

We endure. We get by.We wither and die. The ends draw us in.The river stays dry. The plains sing a songof bitter lament. The mountains think betterand will not repent. Seasons turn, climates change.We cry from the wheel, in vain, remain. We endure. We get by.We wither, and then, weContinue Reading

It was summer and the heater was on. Bob couldn’t turn it off. The 1947 Pontiac he was driving chugged along on flat open road. The car had been restored from brown, back to its original colors, teal and seafoam. Before the restoration, we had known these colors were theContinue Reading

A man is mowing his lawn at dawn with Airpods on in a yard five houses down. He is listening to a convicted felon describe fugue states and contemplating the utter silence of his street. It has been almost eight months since his wife left with Arwen, their Bichon Frise,Continue Reading

Sometimes you walk in darkness, sometimes you walk in light. You get betrayed in ways large and small, at the same time you get lifted up in ways large and small. Sometimes the hand that reaches out to you is something large to grab onto that holds you firmly inContinue Reading

The desolation started during the pandemic.Lines at the bank wrapped around and around the block.For someIt was their first encounter with the demon of food insecurity. The young ones cried carrying around an empty stomach forGod knows how long,While the parents whimpered embarrassed as headlines labeledthem failures. Others hoarded suppliesContinue Reading

Hunkering down on a steel gray October day on a mural of B.B. King that Bobby Sutton painted at the end of Promontory Point. Having a smoke and looking all the way to where the water and the sky meet. The rap of strait pipes echoing off the worn-out brickContinue Reading

1.in the pistachio-shell hours of some thousand grassy nights.innumerable like feet on street cornersand all their destinations. my mom’s new car belonged to someone’s old son,its duct-tape flapping as she speeds, the bumper banging along,happily and in disruption, mile after mile afterrrr 2.i walked from one city to the nextContinue Reading

we build home out of half a whatever.a deck of cards smeared across the asphaltour hands slapping wildly like flying fish.a watery tongue spills over the rock ledgeand licks at the salt of our spilled trail mix. i’d write to the water but i’d be wrong.we don’t come for theContinue Reading