Short Fiction and Poetry

In the same week Merriam-Websters announced authenticity as its word of the year, I was pressed to look up the meaning of emergency [...]

In Poland, I have a cousin who lives in an old Soviet bloc, and on the outside you'd think ruin, [...]

Moon, a smoky melt pasted. Hangs. Wavers. Last night flashes. Cool smell in dry grass. Northern lands so warm. [...]

an owl watches there. what does it know? it must have seen all things. the trees are high and water flows at the bottom after long paths[..]

I stumble over graves, crushing flowers with my heels. The sun fades into the hills, gates scheduled to lock at the first hint of night [..]

solitude shines in the blade of a knife ornate patterns carved into the handle an alluring thing i grasp a piece of beauty [...]

Golden glitter unicorn snowglobe gifted at Christmas, shaken, spun. Hunches and hints of past adventures, [...]

Have you been at old Tinharp's lea That's local to the blue fount's welling? Then must have seen the broad-leaved tree—[...]

Come quickly.    Be furtive and ever silent. As voyeurs we shall bear novel witness.  Look there and give account... [...] 

Two women jog in the dark pre-dawn glowing with fitness and self-discipline along the straight streets, but not together. [...]

The mountains stretch behind me Wind blew me out of town The morning sun will blind me I rode the highway down [...]

We are stuck between nowhere and somewhere— where the earth’s true north and magnetic north align. Reapers reach out to us from beyond[...]

Each day seeing more And more petals have Dropped and wishing That I could save them

I am the watcher of the space between the ground and rocks you step on, the feeling you get when in the woods [...]

The clock hands orchestrate the change in us all, like a conductor waving his baton

The people who make your water filters (y’know, the kind that goes under your counter, in the long, blue tube) were pretty unhappy. [...]

I took my kindness to the river and held it under: Felt the flesh of its neck beneath my fingers As it expired [...]

i wish to origami myself into a paper butterfly– smaller, smaller–until i can fit inside the gaps between your ribs

My foot throbbing, unable to walk, I lay on a cot in Emergency.  The light was too dim to read.  I closed my eyes. 

And I remember your painting of cows with blue shadows well ­­- the copy of Dirk Wears White Socks you hid and played