I’ve just started a new job as a newspaper reporter, and I’m facing what’s known as “the daily test.” That involves finishing a small-potatoes assignment by lunchtime to be available for a bigger news story in the afternoon. I really want that bigger story. I need that bigger story. So I’ve got to get that […]
The Test: Did I Pass or Fail? Read More »
City College, New York. September 1971. I was sixteen, turning seventeen in three days. Chemistry 101. First day, first college course. On the stage, Professor Mulvaney stood at his podium. Steep auditorium classroom. Three hundred students. My assigned seat: second row, center. I already knew an engineering degree was not for me. It was my
IT was the death of it that mattered. Not to me but to him. He needed to see it gone. Dead. But he couldn’t watch it leave. I could I watched it to make sure it was dying. I watched it so I could say when it was Dead. He didn’t understand the motor. Too
Imagine the infinite patience of a God who invents the laws of motion, and gravity, and thermodynamics and then waits a few billion years to see if we’ll figure them out A God who knows how to make a wheel but lets us drag rocks through the forests to build our homes before we bring
Withholding Answers Read More »
It’s a snowy night, and Melissa wakes up to the sound of scraping. The ice has accumulated on her neighbor’s car. Swoosh, scrape. Swoosh, scrape. Why does he do this every night? Where does he go? He’s old. He should stay in bed. Melissa doesn’t have to look at the clock to know that
So this is what it feels like— Change. A cocoon enveloping the past. The willing caterpillar focused on the yet-to-come. Transformation within: the task. I’m told, to be a monarch, a caterpillar must hang upside down inside the chrysalis dissolve itself into a soup of cells and then wait for what seems like ages to
(a Golden Shovel) Straw Dog Writers Guild’s WriteAngles Conference “Through the Thicket of Thorns Stories Grow” rising creakily from the straw an aging farm dog struggles to follow horses and riders as in prior years. sun gilds eastern hills with its early morning rite. a slanting beam of light angles across the conference of mists
When I’m in my house alone and stop to note it, a feeling of satisfaction goes through me. In the silence, I sense the space. The space I’m in and the rooms I know lay just beyond, or up the stairs. I sense all the life and noise that has filled it before and will
The last birthday present she gave me A reversible vest, brown on one side Yellow on the other, I wore it when I needed to look tough Still hangs in my closet Still wear it for protests and events Where I might need to be found I’ve never been lost in my yellow vest A
“We begin in admiration and we end by organizing our disappointment.” —Mary Ruefle Death took her spirit; her body remained. Daily, I greet the jar of her remains. We can’t organize these disappointments. Eight of nine cups have broken; one remains. Violent winds shear away foliage— soon only vultures, bare branches remain. Time is a
