This morning's bank teller is a chatty sub who tells me she noticed, just yesterday, some new wrinkles. She adds (and not happily): I...

          For my mother—           a mystery. Two years ago the phone call arrived, tragic as a gut-punch, you know — That Call... that call...

I went on a date with a straight man. His voice, when I was with him, an echo in an empty hallway. I wasn’t there. He worked in a warehouse....

You made a big deal about showing me your Andrea Gibson tattoo, as we drank coffee at ten pm. It was before I had a tattoo, when I could sti...

Like watching clouds dissolve into animals the snow beneath my fingers takes the shape of a man long dead. A portrait in white and winter wi...

Shoes scattered by the door Coats thrown on the couch Cat sits on the wide sill to watch birds Your coat still hangs in the closet Vera Kewe...

We craft word-coffins for our inner necessity, holding our parents’ hands in hospice quiet; questions of loss and grief are not asked as tim...

I always passed that shop window on my way to work— my first job as a married mother of two. Earthenware at its finest: a decorative bowl wi...

I drive home from the casino, having almost broken even at blackjack, having overeaten at the buffet. The air conditioning blasts on high an...

Her last words spoken from the Tower: "The executioner is, I believe, very expert, and my neck is very slender." But not as slende...

          (The Fate of the Good Soldier Švejk) The road lengthens. Death never seems near enough. The wind points its cold finger at me, ack...

An incredibly thoughtful and kind poet recently asked how she could support me and/or Red Eft Review.  It made me feel seen and appreciated....

A gentle powdering of snow overnight, like talc on a baby’s bottom. Enough to show there are no footprints outside my door, or under my bed...

On a makeshift stage at the back of the bar, Mabel Starr and her band belted out the blues of their sharecropper forbears, infused with a mi...

You kneel in your camos beside a three-point buck, and grabbing the elegant head by the antlers, twist it with both hands into an unnatural ...

Eva buys a purple hydrangea from the vendor in the turquoise truck beside the poems-on-demand tent. She tells the poet behind the orange typ...

The ground we walk on in its solidity, what is it other than a place to exist? What is existence if it goes unnoticed— if we, walking the gr...

My mother named her Schnickelfritz, mischievous child. A gray tabby who hummed the world to sleep with her sweet purr. One of the pets who l...

Biscuit-colored fur his ribs show through, dark liquid eyes, Kai is gentle as a doe but plants his legs like stilts, looks sidelong when I t...

An antique mirror browned at the edges, now hangs in my entryway. It sees me, pauses, searching for my grandmother. Brought home after the b...