M-I-S-S-I-S-S-I-P-P-I
I found the Sterlington, Louisiana Library, a new building only five years old, located a hop, skip and a jump away from where I now live. A big rig got impatient with me looking for the right turn and blew his fog-horn honk up my jeans, gave me the startlement treatment, while I thought, what […]
Standing at the Pizza Altar
Walmart in Monroe, where I walked through what seemed like a hundred brands of everything and anything before I found, in between the frozen chicken and packages of lasagna, the frozen pizza aisle. Full disclosure here. I’ve never shopped for food at Walmart, maybe in search of a light bulb or toilet paper, but not […]
Plane Time
I dreamed a silicon chip looked like an Aztec mask, a great yawning blackness where a mouth should be. A dying vampire awoke in a pool of perspiring blood cared for by a young woman with a baby. A Dallas waveform appeared. A shine on Bachman Lake, sun sparks on oil floating? The flight is […]
Sterlington or Bust
Traveling 2,000 miles from Oakland, CA to Sterlington, LA, on every highway I chased unbeatable savings, followed a road where free and fast never go out of style. Shifted lanes eastward past the Chiracuhua Mountains, camel-colored assemblages of rocks, windmills and ghost towns of pecan groves with orchards of plastic bags caught on branches. Dollar […]
To My Dead Namesake
To My Dead Namesake To the dead Lenore who always appears on the same Google page, an interloper who comes up in search results by virtue of our identical names, twinned on the Internet, the two Lenore’s, one a writer, the other a Route 66 historian, the first woman to receive the John Steinbeck Award for […]
Jumping Around
We watched news reports about Hurricane Isaac as it churned over Plaquemines Parish and spun toward the oil refineries of Baton Rouge. I flew to San Francisco to get the rest of my stuff to bring back to Monroe, glad the scab of purple clouds which covered the moon the night before didn’t mean my flight […]
Get Your Dervish On
Missing breakfast, I ventured downstairs to Kybele’s cafe in the hope of scoring coffee, treated to the same plus an amazing fruit platter of halved apricots, sweet and sour to the taste, slices of watermelon and oranges. Thus fortified, I filled my water bottle and head for the plaza where vendors sell roasted corn and […]
North Lake Merritt Bench Crone
She sits on a bench wearing a carved tree resin rose black garbage bag filled with acorns, eucalyptus leaves, her bandages of flesh. Whatever she finds she stuffs into her hotch-potch pot, plastic water bottles discarded after a three-mile run, flyers from a flea market. She conducts a crowd of seagulls away from her lack […]
Unemployment Statistics
This is a story of two coffee shops that face each other on opposite sides of the street. One is General Arthur’s, named after a World War II veteran who had taken up donut-making until his death from a heart attack. Now it’s Jeff Dong who oversees the General’s ten varieties of donut, including the […]
The Land of Silence
This is a story about Randy and June, who lived in the Land of Silence. Every day they walked five miles outside the city to pick walnuts from the walnut trees, which is how they got enough to eat. But in order to have a cot to sleep on and a well to wash their […]