The neighbor with dementia wants what she wants. I go to five or six shops to find it, even then a close approximation: Slim- Fast milkshake...

We wade through shallow ends of empty pools & crowded rooms. Our heads drip onto our phones. Who are you? says the stranger, a lusty god...

The bakery burned all night. Flames rose like astonished birds. The smell of sugar turned bitter as smoke stitched itself into the trees. By...

My father wore threadbare white t-shirts and blue pajama bottoms to bed, a plaid bathrobe in the mornings. He liked to read the local paper ...

Every month or so they come, Mom quietly, Dad trying to be nice. Last night he had me slivering cashews. He wanted them precisely sliced but...

Grass smells funky, just like it did when I was young and cool and my use of it was nonmedicinal, but now, given my accelerated rate of deca...

The stalemate was over corned-beef hash. As sunlight faded in the kitchen, family life went on elsewhere without me. It was a meal without g...

Good morning! You may call me Ellie. I will be your guide today. My Abenaki name is Lady Slipper. This exhibit hall is circular, in keepin...

In the amount of time it takes you to brush your teeth He assembles 500-piece jigsaw puzzles Starting by turning every interlocking bit Over...

          born 8/30/2025 A fire in the Olympic Mountains cast a golden spell on the moon the moment of your birth. Out on the deck, a breeze...

Our third-grade teacher, Mrs. Dyer, says to us: No Chewing Gum. But ruminants, we chew and chew — Double Bubble, Juicy Fruit — and blink awa...

After the train to Canton no one believed I wanted to walk. There is the train they said. Or bus. But for twenty days I’ve walked across Chi...

Bless these ferns that struggle to lift their heads in a world where temptation is a bulldozer and man is blind to everything that doesn’t b...

If I wake early I walk toward the sun; if late, away. I accept what the island provides. Obvious things I leave: shells, numinous and ordina...

If only the wind had leaned in with a whisper, instead of slamming the door like a judge. If only the tea had steeped a little longer, and t...

The woman lies alone in the field— you’ve seen the painting—peering over the horizon. The gray, weathered house looms behind her, overwhelms...

Four days before Christmas,           he died. She wrapped herself           in silence. No need for that constant stream of one-sided conve...

We are becoming a police state, says HCR, who lives across the river. Apparently, she never sleeps. Her essays, cited thoroughly —to rub met...

Methodist Social Services sends mention my maternal grandmother suffered with arthritis, died of diverticulitis, but there is nothing more. ...

My impatient adolescent brain thought Alexander the Great got it right when he severed the Gordian knot with one slash. I spent many years t...