Malignant normalcy

“Until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.” African proverb A duck is not a goose  quack, quack. Call it what it is quack, quack. We stood on the old stone steps, my sister and I, steps that watched over Lake Huron and there she was,

Valentine singing on an open sleeve

“Water, water, every where Nor any drop to drink” –Coleridge It is her touch I remember as soft and willowy as a drop of dew. The fingerprint that claims a part of my soul, her touch so soft is what she eats now slipping down without the choke. The vee of geese upon the wing,

The book of forgetting

It nests within carpet fibers, that enter the room thought, lint blows after you when you leave, nudging at your back – backtrack yet again and you wonder how soon will you be your mother, sitting in her chair without the days of yesteryear. This herb is for remembrance yet it slips beyond my tongue.

Red red cardinal

When the shark of Wall Street scratches for sparrow blood you know that you are living  in a freaky Stepford world, with requisite manikin wives and all those lily-white pearls. The treatment of mother earth like a childhood piggy bank leaves nothing but hermit crab shells in humanity’s wake. The word magic that he uses

they tell me

they tell me my mother has a lovely smile when words turn to mush and the past departs when schoolyard bullies tweet nuclear taunts my broken soul remembers just how lovely it is – my mother’s smile 1/4/2018

While you were sleeping

My mother sits beside me, I warm her hands with mine, her eyelids close in sleep – her memory is lost in better times. The 1930’s were dark – but from this darkness came a deal for the ages. The farmhouse of her youth was reached by the REA*. The mother of my youth, knows

Water stories : an octet

1. My grandfather slipped into silence for several days at a time. It was a family thing, you see, my grandmother and her sons accepted water from a stranger – he meant no harm. Brother Harry from diphtheria went to a grave in Wyandotte’s ground. Willy he never knew nor do I know of his

Beloved

My life these days is lived in the fog of a visit to mom. We sit at lunch, lost in 90 years of forgetting. I caress her with sweet nothings to bring a smile that I can lose myself in. I want to lose myself in this forgetting. To remember is to think of death

grandma redux

and so you’ve gone over there to pastures irish green the sweet scent of clover crowning your hair your frame upheld in clouds of pearl white the smooth out-flowing of sweet harp music greets your ever-giving heart you’ve gone i’ll try to keep this void inside me from swelling out of my veins i can’t

Grandma

A good woman passed this way, sweet she was, as the apple- cinnamon aroma drifting towards my stomach; I was always filled with her. A good woman walked on by, kind she was, as rumors that never existed. She never broke my heart. A good woman lived once here – in this very spot where