Have you heard what dying people are said to regret? Working too much. Spending too little time with family and friends. Not speaking up when someone is out of line. Postponing joy. These are real regrets. I know […]

I remember the moment I knew my grandmother’s mind was slipping away.

My cousin leaned in to give her a kiss and say goodnight. “Goodnight, Dahh-ling,” she replied as only she could, and then, to no one in pa […]

To me, being alive means dealing with one challenge after another—some glorious, others not so much. My current, decidedly inglorious challenge is having chemotherapy for metastatic cancer. I think of ch […]

69 Killed on Eastern Jet in a Crash near Charlotte
New York Times,September 12, 1974

Like Odysseus, you sail the ocean in howling winds.
No arm chair academic in corduroys,
you are my […]

 
I’m drawn to the wild juxtapositions that collage creates. I love the idea that anyone armed only with scissors and glue can construct an image that’s as fresh as a dream and just as st […]

Low clouds and the slate-
colored river glimpsed
through the trees, the train
jolts into the day.
A day like this compresses
your thoughts into scraps, I said.
One day’s like any other,
they f […]

The other day I heard somebody use the phrase, “the dead of winter,” and I thought, wow, it surely is. Punxsutawney Phil to the contrary—nor yet the strangely benign weather we’ve been having here in central […]



Podcast: A story about a change in roles.

A fictional story performed by Joe Guay.

Read the story online: Come and Get My Gun

It’s insane to try to sort days out of days. Some days you have it and some you don’t, but the thing you have or not is never just one thing: it is a stockpile, an accumulation, a buildup, a collection, a poo […]

The Pines

Behind Snow Drive,
rusty needles led to a pine grove,
where we made little circles
with dirty rocks
and lit little fires
with matches lifted
from the corner store.
These days the pines
that […]

Not until age seventy did I recall a place I’d never been—the Teenage Fair. Launched in 1961, it became a so-called “mini world’s fair for teenagers” which featured, according to one of its newspaper ads, a “b […]

“I change, but cannot die.” Shelly “The Cloud”

As my wife and I are on our morning walk, I often comment on the clouds above: the constant change they float themselves through, the subtlety of hues they dr […]

While I waited there
in the terminal at Newark,
I spotted something
out of the corner of my eye.
It was a bird flying back
and forth along the ceiling,
and because I was
in an airline […]

Once I spent an afternoon at Appomattox walking the Via Dolorosa of the Confederacy. The Richmond-Lynchburg Stage Road is mostly just a trace now but this is the scene of the last march. Here’s where Bobby Lee r […]

Peace Offering
I still don’t know what to do
with the jacket hanging in my
closet. It’s not that old but like
a Brautigan novel is out of fashion.
Maybe it all comes down to math
and how for the first tim […]

I remember the exact moment when I decided to become a writer. It was the winter of 1987. I was in sixth-period study hall, gripping Stephen King’s Pet Sematary. The book catapulted me into the world of Louis C […]

The plant in the corner needs to be watered. It’s staring at Anita again. A cold deadpan interspersed with the occasional slow blink. The plant doesn’t have a mouth but if it did she imagines that it would yel […]

The city of my birth, as seen from above, is a ragged landscape of canyons. Highrises, lowrises, the steeple of an old brick church. Streams of yellow taxicabs where forests of hickory and chestnut once grew. To […]

—for Nicole Marie

She asked me to stand by her side,
But I wanted to see it all
Because I knew that I’d forget—
Even as hard as I’d want to remember—
The brunt and the bitter
Forcing my son in […]

I love mornings.

For me, this time is full of promise and magic and possibility. Anything could happen today. Nothing negative has marred the perfection of the peace and quiet. No one has made any demands. The […]