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In the Absence of Swans
Boston, March 2015. The garden awakens from a winter deeper than any in recent public memory. The last in a line of four girls seated on the pond’s perimeter screams dramatic fury as winged bodies, en route to plunder the thawing earth, whisk behind her head. “Where do the swan boats go in the winter?”…
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Our Complicated Public Union
Walk beneath my canopy, aerial assaults pinging as you find a pace. In April’s warm mist your cheeks I keep dry. Hold me and I hold you, the infant wrapped in the folds of her mother’s arms. On clear days you hide me and I take comfort in the act. Hidden on the floor of…
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Fodder for Retrospect
The limp expression on his face was nothing new, but it still tore gently into Monica’s chest each time she looked at her son. With each tear in the fabric of motherhood, she buried the urge to give up, to send him to another doctor, to admit to the nagging suspicion that she might be…
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Overcrowded Consciousness
You lay down just past dusk, your back on a forest floor. You are surrounded by tall trees. Eyes are open, skyward. You listen. Before long, you become aware of a warm, static humming originating from the recess of your mind. Concentrating on the hum, you realize a mash-up of songs you have memorized, rendered…
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Pushing Carts
He had his back pushed against the wall, his knee acutely cocked so the sole of his sneaker found support on the bricks. A lone plastic bench sat cemented in front of him and beyond that was the expanse of the supermarket parking lot. He was the only one out here now, which was rare…
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Care of the Moon
The sun drips behind a mountain range. Lustering clouds bulge high then widen. One breathes in droplets the gracious welkin as if in sport. She is graceful in her expansion, cycling through a billow of personalities. Each begs for attention. Each swells for interpretation. A girl bends to pick a flower. As she tilts her…
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Nature’s Farthings
An unending summer is as rare as a winter wont never to cease. Spring grasses are ever wet and a phantom chill assails autumn gusts. To live where we lived for our sole year, where nature endows ample and nearly equal time to each of the quarterly climes indeed molded the memory of how the…
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Undeveloped Film
When you take a picture, be aware of what it leaves. In the years before taking a picture was as simple as pulling a thin, rectangular device out of your pocket and tapping a certain spot on its glass, people would buy these little plastic cylinders that housed this stuff called film. Those canisters were…
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The You Not Looking
Something’s been holding back the words. It might be the version of me that’ll read these lines one day. Winding me down back roads toward a painted horizon, as fabricated as one on the set of an old western. Pulling my eyes from the one I’m driving towards. Still, something’s been holding back the words.…
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Perpetual Discovery
Seize each breath with the satisfaction of knowing that newness is around each and every bend in the day. Pull the air in deeply. Expel it in due rhythm. Attune yourself to the lyrics of the song you’ve never listened to close enough to realize how precisely they describe your current situation. Imprint to your…
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Knee-high by the Fourth of July
On the opposite side of the road passed the third pickup he’d seen that afternoon donning an oversized American flag waving in the blackened air behind the cab’s smokestack exhaust pipes. Patriotism, he thought as stomach acid warmed his chest, muddied and misled. The giant flag, strung from a 4’’X4’’ wooden post, flapped in animated…
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Copyright Permissions
Yours is the letter I cannot will myself to pen. I fear the contents will be too vast, the envelope too weak to seal. I fear the words will be too heavy, the postage too expensive to afford. This ink is laden with the breach of silence that has been my years since you. Shouts…
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Four/Twenty-seven
The woman who has just taken the empty seat next to me wears the same fragrance I have been programmed to tie to you. I, for a moment, forget where I am, forget who I am, and mesh again as the being we formerly referred to as Us. These senses take command and they tell…
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Sophisticating the Rudimentary 