Deathscape Lullaby Cynthia Cruz Broken crimson Mercedes sedan. Cotton-wood, milk-weed. The taste of cold metal and the repetition of three AM sirening ambulance rides. Yellow cream, three-tiered birthday cake. Cherry lip balm. Pale blue satin shorts and matching jacket with my name embroidered in hot pink, Cindy. Poochie, my childhood beagle, whimpering inside the…
Keeping Time by Mike Orlock I’ve lost time. Lost track of where I left it, (on a table at home, in a desk at work): I placed it somewhere for safekeeping, thinking, That five minutes will come in handy later today or early tomorrow— Just give me a minute, maybe two, I’ll get back…
Tomorrow! The eve of merriment approaches! There have been various “dress rehearsals,” opportunities to don costumes, usually with friends for parties. Here are several images which I captured of my grand daughter and her classmates, enjoying a out-of-doors parade of costumes, accompanied by parents and grand parents. Additionally here is a delightful poem, a…
Thoreau’s Pumpkins by Ginny Lowe Connors It is thought that Henry David Thoreau was the first American to plant Potiron Jaune Grosse, a variety of large yellow pumpkin. Six seeds from France began it all. No abracadabra required, no alacazam— just a bit of manure, some hoeing, a little rain, and…
I Am Waiting By Lawrence Ferlinghetti I am waiting for my case to come up and I am waiting for a rebirth of wonder and I am waiting for someone to really discover America and wail and I am waiting for the discovery of a new symbolic western frontier and I am waiting for…
Fracture Ellen Bass When the grizzly cubs were caught, collared, and taken away— relocated they call it— their mother ran back and forth on the road screaming. Brutal sound. Torn from her lungs. Her heart, twisted knot, hot blood rivering to the twenty-six pounding bones of her feet. Just weeks before I watched a…
Daytona 500 by Kayleb Rae Candrilli Where we’re from, we know ballet as Dale Earnhardt gliding through the traffic of Daytona; we know dance as our hands moving across a table of drunk Miller Lites. This is universal because I say it is. When my mother called me Kayleb for the first time, I remembered…
Death is coming and leaving the tavern, death leaving and coming in. by Frederico Garcia Lorca Many years ago I wrote this poem into one of my little notebooks. There are nine of these small notebooks, small enough to fit inside of a rear pocket of my blue jeans. I liked the poem by…
Reading this poem a few days ago, I knew the poem deserved feature in a blog post. This poem shows the bastardization of language, a symptom of the decay of comity and of peacable order in our towns and cities. The controversy over the status of the door, consciously or unconsciously an attempt to…
Six of us, a wide ranging discussion last night. The topic was death; more precisely, pondering whether death gives meaning to life. The discussion was satisfying. We did not resolve the matter after an hour and a half of back and forth. Briefly in the midst of the session we touched on guns, mass…
