Before surgery, before the bones are set, and while blood flows from Jacob Randolph in quick rivulets, Agi is there. She is the nurse on duty when he is wheeled through the doors of the ER. She witnesses […]

Mom Wants to Talk Football
On the gridiron of family life, she and I stood
the sidelines, flanking the husband and father
who, fourth and goal in the waning minutes,
always called his own number.

She, the […]

Twisting. Turning. Twirling. Swirling. Slipping. Sliding. Gliding. Falling. Soaring. Flying free.

The magic of carnival rides, animals and the whistle of a circus calliope are evoked like silver […]

Images come in my imagination, either imposed by impressions from the movies, music or theater or by simple communication with another person. Some think my works are based on literature, but this is not […]

Michaelerkirche goes back to the 1200’s and looks it. Being from a country whose ancient history—as far as English-speaking people go—stretches back to Plymouth Rock, I have no local frame of reference. What is th […]

How to Grow Wild
 
Vision failing, she feels the leaves
looking for butterfly
weed, a seedling from her
greenhouse for me to take, add
to my efforts to flower
a field. Cup plant, sweet […]

“Period. New Paragraph,” the mother of a good friend of mine used to announce when changing subjects—sometimes mid-sentence.

It’s a good rule for life in general, though. I believe in changing your m […]

If I could erase anything from my distant past (not the recent one), it would be that first half of fifth grade from September to December of 1960. The country was on the edge of its Camelot years with JFK and […]

I’ve lived way out in the country for a little over a year and, with the exception of an inability to have food delivered, I have no complaints. There is something weird about the house though: the r […]

Just another one of those, he’d say to himself when it all got really annoying and he was trying to talk himself down a little. And we know just how to take care of things like that. He’d say this to him […]

The Jumping Off Place
Josephine Hopper’s comment on husband Edward’s painting, Rooms by the Sea, 1951
 
Azure waves float two rooms
           a door opens
              […]

Maida Westabrook was a brave little girl who had a “floating mass of hair, pale gold and tendrilly” and also a serious chronic illness, which had at one time confined her to a wheelchair, but that was in the pas […]

I remember that day in sixth grade at Gap Elementary School with painful clarity. Mrs. Groff turned from the board where she had written in her careful cursive the names of the countries involved in The […]

The heavy, punishing rains have stopped for now, and I step out onto the sun-warmed deck facing our back yard. A third of the space is now a lake, and in the center of this six-inch deep water stand our bird […]

A while ago I went with one of my nieces to get matching semicolon tattoos. This was remarkable for a variety of reasons:

1. I was 56.

2. Years before, when my eldest daughter came home from college […]

My Grandfather’s Garage, 1966
 
Steel licenses, galvanized,
nailed to the wall, black Virginia
plates, rusted and dented,

years spanning a life
on this farm, his World War,
to the second, his so […]

As a retired college English professor, I much enjoy editing manuscripts part-time. Clients find me via a University of Virginia website called Professors as Writers, a service intended for UVA faculty and grad […]

Did she touch you like that, with a little more than love, a little more hurt than you want? Did you see the pain in the dulled eyes; hear the shame in her slurred words? Did you know the room was not […]