In 1982, when I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area, I became what most movie-goers would call an extra, or what the movie business objectifies as “background.” I was in at least four movies, three of them big rel […]

AND YOU, DO YOU LOVE TOO?
I said

I think I said

I must have said

don’t cross

did I know

should I have known

did I email, call, text

stay on the sidewalk

he was far away

was h […]

I never thought that by agreeing to teach a class in anthropological fieldwork I would soon be expected to be a spiritual healer. I should never have agreed to teach the class. I had never done fieldwork, so I had […]

Brass soldiers line up
and pitch to his tune.
Piano man rules the room.
Hot, not sweet,
the band chases the beat.
Strings of guitars
slice the air into bars
and a velvety sax
swings for a splash
while […]

Podcast: Left at home.

A short story performed by Joe Guay.

Read the story online: Diluted by Jaime Balboa

Artist Jane Skafte has designs on our natural environment.

She illustrates her deep concerns for climate change with research, conscience and talent that subtly reveals devastation from the ground up.

“I a […]

New England is fertile ground for any photographer, and I enjoy drawing from this environment. I’ve long had a love of taking pictures. There’s the heft of a camera, the frustrating magic of lens, ligh […]

As I pass the willow-lined pond,
the wheels on my bike click over new cement cracks
from the toll of winter’s thaw.
How is it that not much has changed?
The arms of the same cedars droop over the same s […]

All my life I’ve gotten into random conversations with people where the subject of our life trajectories comes up, and I always end up feeling kind of weird. This past weekend I hung out with a friend who told m […]

When that technician pointed out two heartbeats and two precious teensy penises on the screen, I was over the moon. Buddy leaned over and kissed me and cried real quiet-like, like he wasn’t actually crying, b […]

For Steve Gray, in Sarasota
The pine tops burn orange,
loud and strange: a train screaming on
burning tracks into the full moon.
The moon flutes sunlight to my upturned eyes:
I am as unable as the stars to […]

So delicious—this light, this air, this time, my time, because I have constructed a solitary life in order to free up time to write. Ice chatters in cool, stevia-sugared lime juice; I look out through the window a […]

Lobster mitts might cushion the ache,
my hands numbed
by these cold, rain-wet stalks. The stakes
tenacious, anchored
in beds slimed here and there with rot.
Cut twine and a vine collapses,
limp as kelp. Tug […]

“I seem to have become an outrage addict,” I say to a young man at the gym. I’ve just glanced at the TV screens mounted on the wall in front of the aerobic equipment. As usual, CNN is in full eek mode, and so—li […]

When he put this ring on my finger, my skin was smoother, and more supple. My hand was thinner, and less freckled than it is now. When he asked me to marry him, he got down on one knee in front of the London […]

I spent four days and nights smashed against a bus window in transit to my first husband’s family reunion half nauseous from breathing in the diesel fumes and the aroma of the chemical toilet a few feet behind u […]

The Moth
It would be too simple
to describe its motives
as a flame off course,
a light mistaken for sun.
Loveliness is complicated,
a white body against darkness,
the night’s counterfeit
just beyond a s […]

“We’re walking to the midnight service?” my daughter asked. “With all the hooligans out there.”

It was Christmas Eve. I looked out the window onto the streets of our Eastern Shore town. A mostly full moon moved […]

“Haze opened the extra door, expecting it to be a closet. It opened out
onto a drop of about thirty feet and looked down into a narrow bare
back yard where the garbage was collected. There was a plank n […]