Poetry

The Rapture

I remember standing in the kitchen, stirring bones for soup, and in that moment, I became another person. It was an early spring evening, the air California mild. Outside, the eucalyptus was bowing compulsively over the neighbor’s motor home parked in the driveway. The street was quiet for once, and all the windows were open….

The Art Shows

Down among the art shows     they made some striking models, grotesqueries! It made us think     life wasn’t quite like that was! It certainly gave us pause.     It certainly gave us pause for thought. The room that had no windows     was interesting. The pictures where every face was always     the artist’s…

Conventional Semantics

The symposium entitled Why a Machine Can Write Better than You, and Does wasn’t nearly as popular as Flamethrowers: Is There One in Your Future?, and neither could hold a candle to Guppies in the Kitchen: A Normative Reading. The preponderance of jaded gardeners at Low-Maintenance Gravel: Future’s Flower was nearly equaled by the architects-on-the-lam…

Winter Apple

The last withered one held so long by such a weak tree. Who needed who? I’ll never know. It’s over. The apple just dropped to the snow crust. Things have changed. It’s the only color in the field. The one-eyed gray squirrel finds it by positioning his head to see the side blind to him….

January Weddings

On that January day of gales and sleety squalls the women were being married high on the hill above the city, in the chapel of the University and afterwards they stood in the cloisters shivering in their wedding gowns, being photographed, singly or with a kilted husband by their side the men taking quick drags…

The Days of Blue

Six days a week at 4:40 a.m. sharp, the town crew, two men named Harold in a green town truck, rumbled down the old sewer plant road as if there was a national emergency, crying out, “Code Big Blue, Code Big Blue,” trying to reach the sewer plant before the giant blue prophylactic surfaced and…