Poetry & Prose
Neighbors
My neighbors live behind a fence, inside a front door, beneath a roof. I hear children playing. A dog barks. In the morning the father rolls backward toward work, and the mother toward responsibilities. Someday, after a great storm, perhaps we will meet.
The Meticulous Fascist
Fascists fear differences. They dream of homogeny as they go xeroxing their way into a monochromatic future. A taco on a menu, they think of reinforced borders, dim sum, they do not think of Chinese cuisine. They think of aliens arriving from the Orient. Diversity...
To Be an Old Man
Since I was a small boy, I was aware that I would become an old man. One of my keenly felt memories is sitting with my grandfather and two of his old friends on a porch stoop in the dark. The Camp Washington section of Cincinnati, Ohio where he lived was succumbing to...
Missing a Dead Friend
There is something I want to say, and someone specifically I want to say it to. You. Of the 7.9 billion current sets of ears, none of them will do. None of them are you. The words to speak are here. Your ears to hear are not. Unpicked fruit hanging from a tree....
Fascist*
Railroad trains are fascist. Locomotives have no steering wheel. The train’s direction is determined by the one who laid the track, from despot to depot. No swerving. Nonconformity forbidden. The wheels constricted to roll straight, no deviation from the stated norm....
Days & Seasons
We are snow, women and men, made of water fallen from high through weak sun and cold sky. Vegetation forms facial features, sticks for arms, ice for bones, dense carbon forms an eye. The earth turns and tilts, turns and tilts. The turn gives us a day. The tilt carries...
Watching Cards Being Played
I know little about cards or their games, how to shuffle a deck in preparation for play, preventing prearrangements, aka cheating. The cards in a muddled mess, just like life. The game won or lost fairly, just like life. I once called a 4 of clubs a 4 of clovers....
Poet’s Notebook
Poetry removes the Do Not Disturb sign from the door of our imagination.
The Spoon
There’s a war raging in the Ukraine and I, enjoying the safety of my tomato soup lunch, notice the odd shape of a seldom used spoon, the bowl narrower and deeper than other spoons annoys my lips as it reaches and rests on my tongue. Embarrassing. What kind of man...
Galaxias Kyklos
Sitting on the beach just ahead of my wife and me, a young mother organizes her breasts for nursing. In a carrier, a baby, all mouth and appetite, waits wailing for the guarded ritual of release and relief, when the secreted nipple, heavy with milk, appears,, like our...