The Glimmerine: Chapter 1
Every morning Leah rushed her to eat breakfast, finish dinner, or brush her teeth. At school, her teachers said, “Turn in your paper. Open your book, line up for lunch,” and at the end of the day, everyone scattered from the school steps to duck inside cars where they were whisked away by their parents […]
To Get a Dog, or Not
Down the stairs of my condominium and across Campus Drive I walk along Leona Canyon Open Space Preserve. In April and May, I canter past an expanse of wild radish and California golden poppies. Below there’s a culvert and a pond lined in cattails and home to a family of mallards whose ducklings hide behind […]
Western Seagull
Beachcomber, the sting of salt water on your wings grey garbage collector raking portions from the undertow of my thoughts.
Different Species
Outside the deck two birds wade in birdseed, one small, a dark-eyed junco, the other, twice her size, a brown- headed cowbird a step away from my geranium, quaking its feathers, parrying its beak into a hissing V and insists feed me in a language available to imposter hungry birds. The junco keeps picking up seed faster […]
From Pulp Into Paper
This is from my novel-in-progress, Pulp Into Paper. Brenda Shawn trained her flashlight on the ground and landed in the water on something soft and squishy. She shook her boot loose from gunk. Moving along like a small tractor, she checked the view between trees that led to the road. No one there. She put […]
Leona Canyon Open Space Preserve
Down the stairs of my condominium and across Campus Drive to Leona Canyon Open Space Preserve. In April and May, I canter past an expanse of wild radish and California golden poppies, and beyond a pond that is lined in cattails and home to a changing family of mallards whose ducklings hide behind the rushes. […]
Tucson Starbucks
National Croissant Day at Starbucks coffee counter doesn’t mean a free roll for every shopper, if only to commemorate a special event, people place orders with a drizzle of chocolate syrup. Above the company logo, a girl in wavy ringlets, an understudy for Lady Liberty on New York City’s 42nd Street, her image printed on […]
Autumnal
Maples wrap branches around my rib cage,
a trap of orange and gold leaves filter translucent light,
and like an unsuspecting moth, I’m sucked in
Morning Glories
“…that was that, we could do no more—had to trust to sun and water and time…” My first garden grew in the Hunts Point section of the Bronx where every spring my mother would order morning glory seeds from the P.S. 48 school catalogue, seeds that came in brown paper packets that arrived with our […]
Change the Louisiana State Slogan
It seems odd that the Louisiana state slogan on its license plate is Sportsman’s Paradise. I am not a sport in the way that the slogan implies (hunting or fishing), nor am I a man. With such a gender specific state slogan, Louisiana has eliminated half of its population. But it’s not all about being […]