I multiply weightless suns on ocean horizons: some watery as tears, some sticky as blood. My sable brush says come nearer, rose tone. Come b...

The cats are here between me and the window because it is a warm sunny afternoon and they will not let me work. They bathe themselves. They ...

I come from sagebrush where rattlesnakes coil in shade away from the mid-day sun. I come from rocks where chukars call an echo across fossi...

I wasn’t sure I liked it, the A-framed skirt of that prom dress with its yellow roses, its layer of creamy chiffon. The sash showcased the t...

As the sun sets over the bleak cemetery One of its rays rests upon an old man Slumped on a park bench The octogenarian nods in response to t...

          *The Burren Pub: Davis Square They are always so impenetrable. A dead stare at the wall. Her drink, Some half-empty prop. And the ...

She brews a pot while the children are still asleep, her ritual. Today, I joined her. As I sipped, warmth poured through my darkness. A.R. W...

          “When I need them most terribly, never.”           —Franz Wright, “Words” There comes a time, for all, when we are asked to lose o...

When you fry sardines the whole world will know, my mother would say, seated at the kitchen table. She rubbed the fish with chili paste, sil...

Today’s children will never know what it was like to hear, from outside, the sound of the telephone’s ring inside the house: that persistent...

Along the Cooper River and Pennsauken Creek late spring on the humid coastal plain red-eared sliders slipped through mud and sedge, leaf lit...

Erstwhile classmate Rosemary— I’ve heard she married a count: making her, in the usual course of things, a countess. Either she left the new...

The lung is draining well, the Doctor says during my lunch; at least he has hope. But most mornings I sit in this bed tired of my little sto...

When I was a child Pluto was a planet and a dog. When I was a child Mercurochrome solved everything with its orangey amber blur. When I was ...

The taut turn of river birds through the thick summer air. White-winged axes gliding above the eddies. The river low here. For a brief insta...

I hadn’t seen him for a whole lifetime. When you’re eight, three years are that. I skipped across the broken veins of a badly damaged asphal...

My own sneeze woke me up, a restless mind, scratchy throat kept me from returning to sleep. Pulled on my black velvet robe then wrapped my n...

Call them. It’s a kindness, letting people know they mattered. No harm in a phone call, not with all the time gone by, the bulwark of spouse...

Found a box turtle today butted up against the curb, so I slipped my hands under the hard plate of her smooth belly and lifted her onto the ...

The dead leave their stories with those who knew them, different versions for different people, all of them true. I wish I could speak of yo...