I Wander Into a Memory
When I was little, I did not wander as a cloud. I floated on one. I have to admit, when the assignment was given to us to write about a poem, I did not think I would find one that would capture my interest or my memory. For days, my ears would burn the table of contents as my fingers struck down page numbers in a hopeless search to find something that I could connect with, for something that I could write about and have it be genuine. I was lost, and my hopes for finding a poem that would even hold my interest long enough to allow me to write about it seemed to impossible. I was a...
Read MoreFeatured: Week of Oct. 29
While Halloween has become a holiday of pirates and princesses, it began as a way to honor the dead. On this hallowed week, our contributors pay tribute to those who have passed on. In “Someone Goes Over Old Love Letters,” a poem by Lyn Lifshin, everyday objects and routines evoke deceased loved ones. In “Island Field,” a story by Brian Rodan, a widower goes on a pilgrimage in honor of his wife. In “Stoppage,” a poem by Peter Layton, a windy day recalls images of a loved one. In “An Amount,” a poem by Peter Layton, the...
Read MoreThe Empress of Farewells
My grandmother was the empress of farewells. She was born in England and had seen the Queen waving to soldiers being shipped out to sea. Her mother was a concert violinist with groupies to whom, I was told, she waved a silk scarf as she passed them by to get into her carriage and back to her hotel. Somewhere along the line, Grandmother learned to make a to-do each time she said goodbye. Everyone had to be hugged and walked to the door. When the last of them was out, she would stand on the porch and watch as her visitors disappeared down the moss covered steps that led to the street below. If...
Read MoreNothing New
Knowing my father’s soon to die, I dreamt of Heaven, a wide deck suspended over a highway. I was checking it out as a care facility— the chairs and chaise lounges rickety things, woven plastic straps lashed to aluminum tubing. There were areas out of the glare, under corrugated green fiberglass awnings up on wrought-iron struts. And the dead all about were milling in variable states of haze, in tennis outfits, bathing suits. Where were the courts, the pools? No conversation—only the drone of the road below. Nothing new to learn from that real-world song. I left for the parking garage....
Read MoreBefore It Disappeared
He sinks away, less himself and more a swollen sessile mass planted in its hospice bed, his eyes’ whites like pond ice, his lips unlicked and cracked, his teeth in gluey jackets, voice a scratchy aftermath of what he meant to say and can’t, each breath his chest’s next fight with gravity — it asks the question. The question springs itself, up from the lumpen flesh, the sinking country of his body, and with all this history in evidence, we, who lean against the rails in reverence, we cannot pose the question properly. The fox who watched us as we walked the creek-side trail through...
Read MoreSecrets of the Heart
I didn’t know my mother loved pink roses Until the day I ordered floral arrangements for her funeral Mass She didn’t seem to care much for flowers as a young mother She never received flowers from my father, who tended our special rose gardens each summer I thought she considered bouquets a frivolous purchase Maybe she thought flowers flourished best in their natural habitat My mother grew up with a father whose passion was gardening Flowers, most of whose names I never learned, framed the backdrop of my childhood summers But pink roses? I had to discover an intimate slice of my...
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