When I was ten,       my dying mother moved to the first floor:      wheelchair,      two kids,   no  husband,     snapped bones.        She...

I was the one who carved his initials into the oldest living Longleaf Pine in North America. Well, my initials and Julie’s too, which you co...

From the moment the waitress handed me the menu it became a mask of sorts, and I would begin telling a round of jokes only a mother, grandmo...

spring afternoon sunlight shifts its weight among quicksilver leaves * sparrows chitter a whole town deep in a fig bush * deck of cards tuck...

He wonders why a bank would trust him with numbers. How many times did he get the money wrong like a gambler with aces & awful luck? Her...

blares through the thin walls of my geriatric parents' apartment in the nineteen eighties while my mother is watching her soap opera and...

When the “yellow cattle-truck” comes up the hill, and all the girls set their packs on the seats beside them, enjoy the window view from an ...

          with apologies to Billy Collins How, exactly, do      we know that there’s no bills or mortgages in the      afterlife? How can we...

The eucalyptus outside the apartment keeps shedding strips of bark the color of wet paper bags. At midnight, the hallway light buzzes softly...

I woke from a nap I hadn’t known I was taking, alone with green leaves on the sill, white curtains, sun bleeding through onto a tufted chair...

See—it’s like that trash on the highway, Wind-tossed wrinkled this way and that, Ready to be ravaged under wheels Or lifted. Resting on the ...

Today my father told me about a cat that lives in the ceiling and the time a satellite fell to earth in El Paso, right at his feet. The cat,...

My wife and I sit on a wooden bench in the Great Hall, waiting with friends. A vast vaulted ceiling opens up above us: newly scoured limesto...

Almost as light as she was as a kitten, my old and dying cat lies quiet in my arms, something she would never have done, alert. The clock ti...

The spare room’s door had no lock, so my older sisters often spent time with our widowed landlady’s things, as though they were meant especi...

My dad squandered the money I received in bar mitzvah gifts on a series of bad bets. Then my mom lost a breast to cancer. I was the oldest c...

He rifles through his dead mother’s papers— A passport he had colored on in Crayola, which made her shriek as she chased him with a wooden h...

          "Maybe that's enlightenment enough; to know that there is no final           resting place of the mind; no moment of smu...

Late in life they fell in love, Tom and Roger. Battle-scarred Tom yowled, hissed, slashed at everyone. Roger hobbled on wounded feet, threw ...

It’s made of green plastic but thick and heavy, translucent, poured into a mold. Seated in lotus, palms resting upward, hair in little curls...