During my growing up, I experimented with many media. I taught myself how to dig and process clay from local stream beds. I taught myself to weave. I saved money (from collecting return bottles and such) to buy painting materials and worked primarily in acrylics. I would wash down my canvases in the backyard for reuse. I also sold my mostly black and white optical art posters and hand-made drawing guides to classmates. But doing art is expensive . . . and over the years, I turned to creating images with … Continue reading The Drawings of Lorraine Caputo→
I have a fear of heights. It is a fear of depths, too. Stand on the edge of the Grand Canyon and look down? No, no matter how beautiful it may be. Sit with my legs dangling off a mountain peak? Never. I can’t even look at pictures of people doing these things without flinching. For years, I refused to look over the precipice’s edge into the world of the dying. I ran from them. I turned off the phone, been out of town. I left the room. I have said, “I’m praying for you,” … Continue reading Kali Gandaki by Connie Clark→
I’ve written previously about missing a sense of direction and thought an update might be warranted: It still sucks. Recently, when I was taking my ups driving my brother to chemo appointments in DC (where I haven’t lived since 1982) I asked which way to turn to get into the hospital parking lot. ‘I told you yesterday,’ he said. ‘And, what, you can only tell me once?’ He instructed me to take a left. Grudgingly. Then I’m pretty sure he called me ‘hazy’ under his breath. I stopped myself from reaching over and pinching him … Continue reading You Are Here by Erika Raskin→
The full moon is bright yellow tonight. She watches it rise above the tree line as she drives, rising above the high school building, the water tower. She knows all the months’ moons have names but can’t remember the name for December. It’s not strawberry or harvest or salmon. She thinks it may be ice. An ice moon, but it looks more like a butter moon. A solid, creamy pat in the sky. When she gets to Shadrack’s Land of Lights, she can still see the moon, though lights are everywhere as promised. There … Continue reading Butter Moon by Lydia Gwyn→
The Long Goodbye The dishes undone, the laundry undone, the checkbook balance impossible to follow or read. Then, the falls. So many falls. It was dark, I caught my foot, I reached and lost my balance. And the pills. So many pills, under the chair, under the table, all looking alike, spilled and refilled far too soon each month. And the money, oh, the money pouring out the door on things you don’t need, people who scam and overcharge for services you have no need for. But we dance around the truth, making empty promises … Continue reading The Long Goodbye and Solving for X in a Pandemic, 2 poems by Carlene M. Gadapee→
On the first cold night since early last spring fog rolls onto the farm like a tide. I wake to a cloud buckling in the arena, around the barn, down the hill to where the horses eat their hay. It’s fog but my amygdala says smoke. Then, horses. Finally, fire. But they are safe, heads low as they draw strands of hay with their lips into their teeth. Jaws in circular meditation, as calming as yoga. The painted pony reaches to nose the crescent moon lying on its back along his barrel, a beacon of … Continue reading Remedy for an Excited Amygdala by Billie Hinton→
How do you bear the middle-aged body, all its longing— …… a body grown round. It doesn’t curve with the same sweetness it did on days when they snapped your bra in the hallway or nights when they whispered, You’re perfect, though you never believed it. The body gives up its wounds too, all the times you said no without words. It’s yours now. You stretch out your arms, turn in scarlet-yellow leaves your heart still hungry in its cage. —In the lowering autumn dark you are here, astonishingly, here. Elizabeth Mercurio is the … Continue reading Autumn Landscape by Elizabeth Mercurio→
We always seem to get the red light here, just close enough to Whole Foods to see in while the bus kneels to unfold the ramp that allows the ex-marine and his dog to board and position themselves to go. Across from me, a woman eats frosting from a container with a plastic spoon. And this early, the Whole Foods is aglow. These are the wives of software engineers or they are software engineers themselves, orchid-stem skinny, flushed from hot yoga, selecting whatever appeals to them under a hanging wave of kombucha Then a new … Continue reading Outside Whole Foods by Eliot Wilson→
The Christmas story is full of haves and have-nots, those who are empty and those who are full, those who have shelter and those who lack. As with other biblical stories, it invites us to think about our inner poverties and riches, and how they lead us. Earlier, in the book of Genesis, humans choose their own individual will over sacred order and suffer the consequence of being forever separated from the garden. Exile and suffering mark the course of humanity until the gospels cast a star in the sky that hovers over a scene … Continue reading Advent by Sharon Ackerman→
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