January 2022 Writing

This is my first CNF piece. It's about a different kind of going home.   With A Signature   A yellow bird symbolizes happiness, positivity, playfulness, and hope. My grandfather died canary yellow. The whites of his eyes—yellow. His fingernails,...

Songs for Leaving (A Spider’s Lyre & A Liar’s Yarn)   I.   Home is knowing It can’t rain forever   Sing it three times Please let it be so   Four wicks encased Pirouettes in cracked glass Red-eyed & mesmerized   Dragging my hairy...

I am gazing out my window to the street that passes my house. A white hearse has just passed, and car after car after car are following, each with a little orange flag with a black cross flying from the passenger window. It has been six months since that might have...

Towns, especially villages and small towns, have a heart, and sometimes it takes leaving that town to discover the blood that runs through it, oxygen that sustains it, transfusion that revives it, the legacy that defines it and the generational DNA that lives beyond...

I Remember Mandan, N.D.   I remember puka shells and gay jokes platform shoes and choke holds three broke bones my first week me the new kid the girls liked and the boys tortured endlessly scarecrow tied to a tetherball pole fists and knuckles knuckles and fists...

Joey use to talk about this moving on, like being ‘born again’ he’d say. Said he looked forward to it.   Shirts, pants, shorts, sheets, underwear all lined up on the kitchen table. Liz re-sorts Joey’s laundry into a box. ‘I can’t figure out where his socks are’...

I am walking to the bus station.  After midnight. Spring in Bahia is really about as warm as most of the rest of the year. I wander Rua Carlos Gomes, narrow, wet, fragrant but emptier than this street full of shoppers and tourists in the daytime. My night was okay. ...

Lovettes (an aubade)   This is not a love song. This is an exorcism.   I’m at my desk, avoiding bills, Native Land Rights and Treaties homework and phone calls from friends who want me to go out, feeling like a deflated mylar balloon three days post...

"Our Kitchen" Judy Bates   When I think of "Home", the first images that com up are of the kitchen in my childhood family home. I'm coming in the back door and see our yellow Formica-top table with chrome legs placed against the wall just inside the door. I...

In front of a park The street is quiet, there are a lot of trees, beautiful trees high and green. In the summer the street almost looks like a forest except that  the greens are organized like a well trimmed hairstyle. There are flowers in front of almost every front...

Fresh and flat, clear and simple, wild and choppy, ironed maybe transparent, often muddy, seasonally frozen all berged or summer burnt skin soothed, beginning and end circular yet unseeable, there is one. Home is a lake. By map and touch the shore, return home again...

Welcome to 2022! This is where you can read the January writing.