These are two unrelated pieces, the second is from one of the prompts. Thursday It’s Thursday and all I can think is I can’t wait to have an excuse to take a nap. Dreams of the dead are invading my slumber and when I wake, I can’t tell if I’ve slept. It’s...
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Color in Form: a Ghazal and a Petrarchan Sonnet
Ghazal for my ghosts Gone to ground, my father’s ghost. Poof! Sticks around, my mother’s ghost. Almost. Poof! Oregon raised, climbing harsh desert buttes, she died along the southern Gulf Coast. Poof! She never loved the hot-humid, southern air. She longed for stormy...
Used Birthday Candles
Janie stops at DQ to pick up an ice-cream cake for her big brother, but it won’t fit in the cooler, even though she brought the large one. She puts the cake on her son’s lap instead and cranks the car’s AC. Her son is humming which makes her daughter scream and cover...
halloween forever
i refuse to be damned by this transience i will etch these shallow words with the hammer-kiss of poetry flowing from my brittle broken fingertips against this thin digital screen i will whisper-sing these morning psalms over the baying nephews in the room above...
Know-See-Do…
The background voice. Click-a-tea-lee-counter of that endless chatter. Just an inward whisper, if you dare. No se calma, Senor Tranquilo. Sdyq, friend. As the seed, we make sense of it. Do-si-do. Renew, rewrite. Past, present, presence. Tense no matter. In the...
She loved Mario because
So... I received the Full Mood newsletter/call for submissions in my inbox. This month they proposed using a wordbank for poems or flash and only 24 hours to write/submit. I challenged myself to use ALL the words - for fun. Low stakes/expectations. And in SmokeLong...
Holy Mother
Looking back, I could’ve stopped it. When my uncles, my mother’s brothers, the five-headed mass of them, cornered me at her funeral and said, “Irene was a saint,” I could’ve said no, she wasn’t. Could’ve said, you didn’t know her like I did.
The Ice Sculptor Regrets
One day, the ice sculptor began to melt. As it happened, he came to realize he had a few regrets. He regretted having become an ice sculptor for one thing—there was no stability in it, it had never quite felt like a solid career. His parents had hoped for a more conventional sort of success.
Tool Box
When the hammer comes down, the constituent parts of a cell phone will go their separate ways. It is just a beautiful dream left unrealized, but when annoyed by the texting driver or oblivious teenager holding up the line, rerunning it can never fail to brighten the day.
Airing Laundry
Polly was supposed to be an expert, but she couldn’t do it anymore. How does one stay balanced and regulated when the world is overflowing with stupid and greedy and your mom is dying and your child just got called mop-boy at school even though she’s a girl and beautiful to you and you promised yourself you would lose weight but you ate three cookies waiting for the water to heat for your first coffee and your phone therapy clients have problems that make your life sound like a dream?