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A Cabinet of Coffee Mugs
My father was a quiet, weathered man. Ignoring conventional rules you find in writing manuals, it would be accurate to use the old cliché that he was akin to a closed book. He was reclusive, but pensive. He had been places. More accurately, as he used to tell me, places had visited him. He did…
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Quilt. Dousing campfire. Toy sailboat. Love letters.
The following passages represent four sequential moments from one of my weathered composition books. …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. A patchwork quilt is spread upon the jagged, broken stalks of last summer’s crop of corn. The colors are dull, uninviting, like the content of our conversation. We’ve drifted here. Those pieces of fabric were selected with bleary eyes and…
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Icy Wind
Reader, I wrote this a little over 10 years ago. I was in my junior year of high school. Reading it now makes me smile, cringe, laugh, and wonder – simultaneously. I know it was only ever shared with one other person, who was also from “this little town in this little state,” so now,…
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The Webber’s Sorrow
For the malice Nature thrusts upon us no remedy exists. Time, I have come to believe, is the closest aid in relieving the pain of those circumstances in life over which man has no control. Although time is a concept, an unseen hand in its own nature, it is a healer. What comes to mind…
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The Life Age Declares Us
Now I sit among those who return my loud smile. They rest gazes upon me, swirling their eyes around my head, which remains fixed in the stationary center of the circle. Back in the sub-cultural social geometric shape I’d run away from a year before. Once again a part of the clan. Whatever threads hold…
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Doe Re Meandering
It’s still not clear to me exactly what I was doing driving around that night and when it comes down to hard facts, I could care less. I spent a number of purposeless hours behind the wheel during those months. Maybe it was the result of a living in a small town past my prime…
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Story-telling Self-talk, or Overcoming the Nothings
There is this story in my mind and there it seems fated to remain. I cannot determine whether that’s because I read too much or if I do not write enough. Or do not talk enough. Or do not feel enough. There are these stories in my mind. Some might call them memories. Unreliable, jumbled,…
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Hibernation
Leaves freeze and fall from the limbs that spawned and fed their veins. They are blown by gusts of winter winds, the culprit who makes children’s cheeks turn from peach to apple. I sit by this hollow glass lamp filled with shark teeth combed off beaches of bygone summers. It’s 60 watt, disposable illuminance, must be…
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Romantically-Inclined Commuters
Public transportation, while physically wall-less and barrier-free, will agonize one’s sense of stability within their social world. To experience this sensation to the fullest extent, it is recommended for one to use public transportation at least twice a day and a minimum of five days a week. Travel alone for maximum observation time and tend…
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Trying to Read on the T
I’m outside of my apartment for about three minutes before the trolley stops and its doors bend open to let me in, but I’ve already begun to perspire. The wetness around the base of my neck quickly absorbs into my black shirt collar the same way it’s been feeding the cotton pillowcases on my bed…
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The Goddess Who Lives on the Dirt Road off Route 12
Every morning, on my drive to school, I see her waiting for the yellow bus to come and haul her off to St. Paul’s School for Girls. She wears a red and blue plaid skirt and a navy blue sweater vest because that’s what all the girls have to wear at that place. I drive…
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Page Six
The coats hanging on their pegs look over my shoulder music penetrates my ears drumming through to my feet where they refuse to be still cannot be told where they are treading must contain the shaking legs limbs split the thumping on the carpet where we dug holes for the fish bones found tossed by…
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Ketchup, Bridges, Words.
Drive 272 miles. Check into hotel. Register. Listen. Smile. Nod. Meet new people. Blonde hair. I thought you were a professor. I have saké. I have pistachios. Crack one, pop one. I have greens. Touch lips in the elevator. Look for a condom. Break a condom. I have a fiancé. I am from California. I…
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Ride the Clouds, A Eulogy
You’re not haunting me, you’re reminding me to breath fresh life into my days. The sadness vines itself into a ball in my chest when I think about the man he would be today. I want to call him up, ask him what he’s been getting into lately, plan a trip to the mountains. I…
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Nighttime in Early Morning
Hot enough that you could not bear to touch it, but the nerves on the back of your neck danced all the way to the tip top of your head feeling its radiance from a short distance. Those feelings shoot from your bare toes. This swelling, that release. You swear you almost smell burnt hair.…
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Sophisticating the Rudimentary 