We are all mourners now, our clothes funeral shrouds we tear off our backs when the time comes (and it will come); in one pocket we carry brushes for tidying the graves we stumble on in schools, churches, nightclubs, concerts, grocery stores, streetcorners...
I can't decide anything these days: sonnet or free verse; to read on the couch or spend my son's brief nap putting away dishes as if dishes could ever stay clean; hope or despair...
Bad news blares from every stamen, every mouth, every passing car and leaf blower. I am coated in dust. It has been too long since I left this spot. How do trees do it? Do they too grow stiff and restless
“When you attack us, you will see our faces. Not our backs, but our faces.” - President Volodymyr Zelensky Beneath a Bougainvillea-laced trellis I r
No one is to blame for anything anymore. Or is it that everyone is to blame for everything? Maybe the world has gotten too small: so many billions of us, incomprehensible to ourselves, let alone one another, crowded together
long before the stamps commemorating peace, before factories resumed churning out grenades, some made off with blueprints for conquest, taped them to the walls of their dreams
Suppose I grant you the premise of your question. Should I gather up my limbs at once and build something immortal with them? What could I construct to outlast the drowsy calm of this moment?
Out of the blue our three-year-old declares he doesn’t like the elephant. For days he repeats—unbidden, as if recalling a nightmare—that he doesn’t like the elephant.
Some talk during movies. Others crack their knuckles, drink to excess, buy things they don’t need, make mountains out of molehills.
It's all too much, the floor strewn with gifts we couldn't possibly deserve. But our son is happy, going from toy to toy, and so are we, smiling along with him as he plays with the train, the trucks, the scooter.
So much death and pain today: slaughtered fowls, reminders of genocide and oppression, celebration of abundance denied to billions. Cousin, did you know 400,000 Ethiopians are suffering famine?
At what time the fog took over, I do not know: I was, if not sleeping, attempting to, tossing and turning like a Heron's wing, lost in fog.
