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 particular, “Who was that?” Granted, the woman had nine kids and eighteen grandchildren, and she may have had a rum punch or two, but still, it struck me. Two years later, a few days before Christmas, I sat with her on a bench under a blanket and a blue winter sky in the field behind the old Virginia … Continue reading What We Forget by Tom Coates→
Men in oiled slacks come shuffling down the mount in droves. Combed in purple milk the sky rolls up like bad reception quaking clear from gaveled hits. Dead to hover sun-gray deserts. Hardened skins that settle in the darker crease of echoed canyons. Dusting fields in phantom scrimmage. Threading creeks up meadow’s twilight. Wingtips rippling through the surface. … Continue reading Dead Men Missing Women by Nate Braeuer→
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 chemo as Paleolithic, micro-inch cavepeople marching around my cancerous body, brandishing clubs and whacking every cell in sight. There’s one! Healthy? Malignant? Who cares? Whack! Among the whacked healthy cells were the ones that hold onto hair. After the first chemo session, I went from having what one friend described as “long hippy hair” to being all-but-bald. So being who I am—a determined realist—I … Continue reading A Challenge is a Challenge is a Challenge by Martha Woodroof→
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 red-bearded oceanographer in foul weather neoprene. Like Odysseus, challenged by Poseidon, far from the home fires of Ithaca, you, too, are tempted to taste the water nymph’s petals, but unlike Odysseus, you do not fall out, drugged and dreaming. Like Penelope with sulking Telemachus, I have little ones and sick patients. But, I have no need to pass the shuttle. No need … Continue reading Alan’s Odyssey by Sharon Hostler→
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 startling. Also, I’m attracted to those images that are hypnotic and hallucinatory; the ones that are striking, irresistible, kinky, and unforgettable. One aspect of nature that is especially interesting to me is sexuality in all its complexity and manifestations. Therefore, many of my collages deal with the embodiments of desire, the markers of attraction, and the sacred … Continue reading The Sacred Delirium of Love: Collages by Bill Wolak→
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 flicker along silver like that river, she said. Until the water breaks around rocks or heaves up with tidal surge, I said. The water marries the clouds, they billow along together, she said. Lead on lead, I said. Look at the clouds again, she said. Look at the water. Gregory Luce, author of Signs of Small Grace (Pudding House Publications), Drinking … Continue reading Days like Clouds by Greg Luce→
Where Does Sorrow Take You? Three of us sprawled on the carpet aisle six of Barnes and Noble, Self-Help section after Religion, before Psychology. To my side a shopping bag of new dresses nestled in black. We are looking for an atlas, a guide to where one goes when the father dies, when a husband’s suddenly gone. No maps here. Neither in Travel. We sit closer on this journey than in recent years. We look into each other’s faces, we listen without interruption. Between us there is comfort, there are answers. Barred She arrives in … Continue reading Where Does Sorrow Take You? and Barred, 2 poems by Martha Snell→
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 Virginia, it’s the nadir, the bottom, the halfway mark. As dead as winter gets. Dark in the morning, dark in the evening and the trees still putting scratch marks on the sky. People are apt to scream for no reason, dogs are restless. Cats stare out the window with a patient but hopeless look. If you have a canary, … Continue reading The Pulse(s) of February by Susan Shafarzek→
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 pool, and that pool is not filled in twenty-four hours. There’s the dramatic: days of deaths, dismemberments, detentions, immurements, stoning, impaling, holes poked in the back of heads by vultures to get at the brain, intestines cleaned up by desert ants, but on a scale from one to ten that goes from horrid … Continue reading Brazilian Vacation by Cécile Barlier→
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