Single Parent Kitchen rich with the smells of coffee and honeydew melon, hot steam iron and last night's rain, I lean against the...

Elegy for Erik In a squall, I'd want you at the helm, your eye on map and compass. I’d want you filleting the trout, you as my...

ALMA, HER EYES SHINY COAL ebony, her hair glistening against a pink bunting. She is grinning, looks ready for adventure. Some where else,...

Black Cat Bone “’Cause I’m a voodoo child.” - Jimi Hendrix Big houses turn me on. Under the table in her denim skirt and dark tights she...

A City Square your eyes slide to the right taking mine with them past our pints and popcorn over the heads of benches in the crowded...

Counting Value A Tibetan monk spends weeks carefully pouring colored sand, intricate geometric designs he will dismantle and sweep with...

Cake It was the matriarch’s seventieth birthday. Seventy-first but we will let that pass. Some un-truths are delicate like lace on...

A Shiver The wind’s murmur brings some words to my ear as I slowly walk along the dusty road. The name of my mother – whispered? Dead...

Division This afternoon I taught JaQuan how to divide fractions, the numerator perched atop the denominator, a line of black between...

THE DEAD TREE The tree is dead. Twenty feet tall and dead fifty feet off a point of land and dead. A dead tree in a shallow meandering...

Hyner View I begged him to keep walking up the hill. I pleaded with him to come out of the woods back to me. I promised anything if only...

Thought I was free to Walk all across Africa a walk that began today at 4:44 PM and ended at 5:24 PM nearly ended in my end down the...

Unseasonable The storm moves East, Cold, indifferent, Leaving empty cornfields Full of snow and night. The early green of spring Lays...

AUNT CALLS WANDAWOOWOO AN AIRHEAD I am an airhead--my head is full of air the way a prairie is. Clouds rise in me. Still, Aunt Rita, a...

When I Am an Envelope, White #10 I will keep a space. A flat pocket my gift to give, obvious and secret. Consider the seashell with a...

Aphrodesia if you say it fast is sounds like you’re partitioning a small former African colony. Half Rhodesia Which half do you fancy?...

Bee, Still The clover carries the memory of the ancient bee sting the flower floats the imagery of the assailant barely seen that...

Fury The canvas is a fury of discipline, a pentimenti of empty space where indiscernible images lie beneath. That change of mind leads...

In the end, only you We have loved so long and usually well in lives that bump and collide head on at times; at others glide on polished...

Grandma Jenny’s China Stacked on a shelf in the pantry of my mother’s kitchen, a bouquet first refused by her two sisters, then three...