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Crashing Slow and Sudden

What I also didn’t expect was the premonition. Through the windshield, I half-saw two angels, two somber old gentlemen telling me my life was due. But when I thought to them I still have a five-year-old son to raise, and asked to be given the time to raise him, they both stepped back from me…

Make-A-Wish

Charlie Teitlebaum, a forty-two-year-old surgeon born and raised in the same Boston neighborhood in which Howard had grown up, had not been one of Howard’s residents, but while Charlie was doing his internship at The George Washington School of Medicine, where Howard was on the faculty, he and Howard became friends. At the time, Charlie…

Sunblind at Huayapam

Through blue glass, a table painted blue, roses vermilion, Amber tumblers, candlesticks, a mirror darkening until all Grays in oncoming light. Goats bleat, radioblare, a gunshot. Past the celosia, a tree where yellow birds feed; heat and wind From the mountains. Close your eyes and retinas scald The window crimson, mullions bright of orangeskin Lit…

John, for Christmas

On the radio, they were calling it “snow-mageddon.” Joan had seen it on the news, as well, in a Doppler radar swirl that looked like a green hurricane, pulsing like a sick heart over the Cascade Mountains. The worst of it was supposed to hit tomorrow, midday, but already the snow had begun to fall…

The Cat

The old cat turns by curving what’s left of his body beyond the careless trees. Does it ache, each twinge and cramp, to wander in hunger, ever fruitless at eye level? Across the lawn the sunlight has nearly given up dragging out its whites like a chapel veil, faking away its sullied past, having come…

Park Bench

Behind the bench the Drive, before the bench the River. Behind the bench, white lights approaching east and west become red lights receding west and east while before the bench, there are paved and unpaved pathways and a grassy field, the boathouse, and the playground, and the gardens of a park named for a man…