The weight remains in my hands, that first uncalloused memory of death known. My father’s father gone to grave, to dust but not ashes. The f...

Out for a walk with her dog and her phone, the woman who wakes me, telling intimate details of an argument with her partner, doesn’t know or...

Young robins have woven a hag’s wig into their first nest on the platform of my front porch downspout. When I leave the house through the fr...

The child of my child confides— lots of back-handed talking goes on at school, unfounded whispers of broken friendships. Is she less a girl ...

It is a brand-new box of sidewalk chalk, carried by a five-year-old girl who wandered across the road into the parking lot of the abandoned ...

A woman is in the parking lot of a Milo's Hamburger joint wearing a red uniform tee, two minutes before her shift. She hugs another woma...

Many years ago, while traveling, we stopped at a Kroger in Connecticut. We bought a tray of pinwheel sandwiches rolled in flour tortillas an...

Roz heaps her famous baked apples into Tupperware, Charlotte presses me to deliver...

I miss spicy foods and caffeine past noon. A back that doesn’t ache at night. Hands strong enough to open a pickle jar. Eyes sharp enough to...

The password is “password,” which I guessed quickly, because that’s mine too. Who can remember random digits to thwart hackers? The hackers ...

“Want to know a fact?” my young grandson asked, and without waiting for me to respond, added, “Bees can’t fly in the rain.” Later I looked u...

watching a plane break the horizon all those letters once thought lost were never sent A New England native, Peter Jastermsky lives among th...

A woman is seated at the sushi bar, huddled with the ten-year old boy she came in with a few minutes ago —so perhaps dad is out of town or t...

Our family arrived in New York by trans-Atlantic ocean liner then boarded an all-day train across the wilds of Pennsylvania and into the dar...

a decade later the bell still rings chemo Roberta Beach Jacobson is an itchy poet living in the flyover state of Iowa. She writes verses per...

Baby doves. It's a wonder they arrive, given the adult females, the way they dodge the males, darting this way and that for hours or day...

test results lost in the doctor’s hawaiian shirt Stephen Toft lives in Lancaster, UK with his wife and their children. He is the author of t...

hungover walking the dry riverbed Stephen Toft lives in Lancaster, UK with his wife and their children. He is the author of three haiku/tank...

After my father died, we didn’t try to talk my mom out of eating the cookies she called “lunch” nor the ice cream sandwiches in their blue w...

Who is jealous any time someone wins a Powerball and it isn’t you–even though you didn’t buy a ticket, haven’t bought one in years? Let it n...