PORTRAITURE
Our dinner ends with watching Portrait
Artist of the Year. For Adele likeness is all,
while I focus on the how of its attainment.

Beginnings proliferate and lead on to
ever more […]

I was walking our dog this evening, around six o’clock, when I heard the low rumble of an approaching train. I live in Silver Spring, Md., a few blocks from where the tracks cross over Georgia Ave.

When […]

Ten years after graduation, at seven a.m., Sunday morning, I round the corner to my office and nearly stumble into a distraught family in prayer. Six adults, seated with their heads bowed, listen as a Catholic […]

I am so sick of walking past the cute little signs that say
please clean up after your dog. really? do we want our ivy,
our pachysandra, our Vinca covered in pee and poop?
do we want our perfectly […]

Sylvia wished she saw anything but houses when she looked out her bedroom window. A field, a lake, or the foggy moors of Wuthering Heights. Or if there must be houses, let them be stately. Like Pemberley or […]

Among other national celebrations like Black History Month, Great American Pies Month and National Library Lover’s Month, February is also National Self-Check Month. Turns out, there’s a whole yearly calendar of […]

 
A Chisel and a Rock
They say He created heaven, earth, and mystery:
The jungle lion’s guttural roar
The celestial twinkling of stars

Tell me
Where is your soul? And
does it move with you like the mo […]

It was late December, and I was heading to downtown Vienna during a pandemic. As I reflected on the task ahead of me, buying Christmas presents for my mother and grandmother, the mayhem inherent in completing that […]

My study may be a mess, but, on one wall, I have meticulously created a shrine of sorts. My “Air Force Wall” is—like my connections to its theme—a mixture of the authentic and inauthentic. The shrine came togethe […]

Marinara stains blotted my white hoodie’s waist hem like blood droplets. Posters of fighter jets lined the grey walls of the recruiter’s office. A Dodgers baseball cap squeezed straight brown hair over my ears and […]

Primarily a poet and writer, I came to photography by accident. I was on a summer nature walk in southern Ontario, Canada, when I got lost. It was incredibly hot and I had forgotten my water. My wife had […]

In truth there was never a snake or an apple;
and they knew already about lust, had known forever
what creature didn’t

It was that they lived long
saw the wolf and the tiger grow old and die
saw the t […]

My evolution from wanting to write, to loving writing, to having to write did not proceed quietly. The more I lost myself in the craft, the more I anguished over what it meant to be “good enough” and, once goo […]

To: Team Members

From: Jill Valentine, MENTOR

Re: Time-Off Requests

Dear Team,

First off, how lucky we are to still be thriving in this economy! Because not everyone’s so lucky. Some people are o […]

White spotted breast, orange and black
on your head—I wouldn’t have seen if you
were not warm in my hand, but dead.
At the thud of a window strike I ran
for the deck, hoping for merely s […]

Each year for the past eight or ten, I have been given The Best American Poetry by a member of my family at Christmas time. The adults of our family are assigned, on a rotating basis, their gifts recipient, […]

I have a scar under my chin, right at the end where it meets the jaw. You can’t see it unless I’m hanging upside down, which is a rare occurrence these days. I’d forgotten about it—hadn’t seen or touched its rough […]