My Publications

A Beautiful Mess, this life, one day a call for brain scan and plans for neurosurgery, days later, a second scan, the findings artifactual and unremarkable. Yes, beautiful and messy. Like love. A love- at-first-sight kind of love, as frightening and exhilarating as a…

All Together Now —after Zadie Smith Even if our lives are full of days and we feel the weight of winter on our shoulders; and even if the fires burn all around us, flames licking our sandals, and flirting with our souls; even if creation’s groans grow loud like gongs…

I’ll Always Remember Us washing dishes in the big two-sink white enamel stand-alone by the fridge, me washing in the hard water that wouldn’t allow sufficient suds, you rinsing, then drying with dingy, blue-striped towel or thin yellowed cheesecloth that didn’t…

Lordy, Mercy —after Bob Thompson’s Garden of Music (USA) 1960 I heard your story, Robert Johnson, how you could rip the harmonica and jaw harp like the night wind in the pines, how sorrow clotted in your soul and the blues burst forth when you lost your kind-hearted…

  Anxiety Can Be —after Patrick Ramsay a footpath, a mountain trail, a clearing, a busy road. Can be red. Yellow. Smoke signal. Maybe beige. Can be baby’s breath. Can appear in mid-day or in the black hole of night. Before presidential elections. After. Perhaps…

For My Husband on Our Fiftieth Wedding Anniversary I am reliving the April after we married when we moved home to nurse a sick father, the long, ’67 Galaxie pulling the boxy little U-Haul with all our belongings. I am reliving your shouldering the RCA rabbit-eared…

To Break a Heart It’s his first day of playoffs. Gold and black cleats. A run to stands before the game to tap his grandmother on the shoulder, smile saying, Watch me crush it, and then as fast as Nolan Ryan’s yellow hammer, he’s back with his team huddling with Coach…

—after Frida Kahlo’s Memory (Mexico) 1937 Heartbreak moves with no wind and no water, little light, and not much life. Heartbreak is a stiff dress on the clothesline, suspended in silence. At onset, heartbreak feels like one foot on land, one in the sea. Or heartbreak…

Angel or Demon? —a haibun in winter We exited the elevator at the medical center and suddenly, he was upon us like a zone-tailed hawk. Don’t I know you? Where are you from? I know you. Do you remember me? He never let up, his gold- tooth smile as inviting as the shiny…

 —with Seamus Heaney’s definition of hope Winter is the soul shrinking like the last orange in the lead-glass fruit bowl on the kitchen counter, and it’s the scattering of stale bread on the hard brown ground for the robin who might come hop, hop, hopping along….