Category: Uncategorized
-
Last Words
The tiny lamp on my nightstand with its brushed aluminum base and yellowed shade covered in dust spreads light all over my bedroom. It lends a glow to each wall spills lumens on the carpeted floor and makes shadows evaporate from the corners of the ceiling. Tucked away on a shelf below rests a draft…
-
Root Beer
Lips pursed around the straw for the first sip, my gullet floods with bubbles and sugar. That sassafras-flavored beverage also brings me a dose of caffeine. A few slurps later, I feel effervescent. Like an ice-cold soft drink in a plastic cup, my elevated mind begins to fizz. Thoughts occur unbidden. Ideas burst. It is…
-
Change
When the hammer strikes against a metal sheet and leaves its mark on the tranquil flatness now forever changed sculpted into a new shape so it is with certain events and the impact they have on life such as the sudden loss of someone close – not like a rock thrown in a pond whose…
-
Snow Geese
Between moves, going through boxes of stuff, discerning what I want to bring with me from what I am ready to throw away, I discovered some fragments of poems I began during my first marriage. There is a piece from at least ten years ago about a week we spent in winter at my former…
-
After the Election
Hiking After the Election (November, 2016) Hiking Castillero Trail in autumn, the early afternoon sun low enough even pebbles underfoot cast shadows beside my own along the dusty path, I feel surprised how green the landscape is: coast live oak and madrone well-endowed with lush foliage on all their branches, grassy hills verdant from this…
-
Bourbon Over Ice
San Mateo County Sheriff’s Office is a cash-only bar: exact change, please. I learned this when I went to pay the fee for release of my car from impoundment which was towed during Labor Day weekend because of expired registration tags. The evening after I got my car back I thought of the sound the…
-
Divorce Boats
That’s what our guide called the tandem kayaks our tour group used to explore the ocean – an epithet, he explained, that comes from how the boats split labor between partners: the person in the bow paddles forward while the one at stern uses the rudder; both can see the course ahead, but the two…
-
Baby Rattlesnake
I reacted to the baby rattler before I was even aware of it – a phenomenon of instinct, I guess, when the body can recognize a snake prior to the mind having any time to perceive it – and without given conscious instruction my arm moved itself up to block the path of my pregnant…
-
Birds-of-Paradise
In the median of a parking lot birds-of-paradise crane their slender necks up to the sky, catching rain as it falls with orange flowers like wide-open beaks eager to be fed straight from heaven’s mouth.
-
Which Way We Sleep
It is a little-known fact that babies asleep in their cribs will shift themselves into alignment with earth’s rotation: tops of heads face west, tiny feet point east. Getting older, we become attracted to either one of the opposite poles: north and south each beckon our loyalty while our weary bodies lie in bed. But…
From the Firefly Galaxy 