My Mouth Could Kill Someone
inspired by Erica Hunt I was oblivious, optimistic even, when the pandemic arrived and my youth grabbed the first train out, one way ticketed. I took the pause gladly, a minute to listen to the clock’s tocks, close my
A Plate of Pandemic
Published Quarterly on the Solstices and Equinoxes
Creativity in Times of Crisis
inspired by Erica Hunt I was oblivious, optimistic even, when the pandemic arrived and my youth grabbed the first train out, one way ticketed. I took the pause gladly, a minute to listen to the clock’s tocks, close my
As I bemoan covidity, I secretly recognize karma for my younger self’s joy when the thermometer shot up—“that’s why they call it quicksilver,” my mother said— beyond 100 and school was “out of the question” leaving me instead to answer
There is a stoplight now in my hometown at the intersection of Highway 69 and 210. I slow my car down, impatient for the light to turn. I look over at the cemetery where my mother-in-law is buried. I
Attention, if given, is perfunctory. This physician’s assistant, that nurse practitioner, not ever the doctor, pretend to listen, what can they know about something no one knows, without glancing at your grey face, they type endlessly into crispy flaked laptop
Grief is a traveling. You pull the world through a hole in your heart to transform it. This traveling stems from a disunion, a failure to tolerate the landscape. If you have been party to grief you have been moved.
hot summer day flaunting its distractions sings a siren song of temptation through the open windows of boredom and alone come out and play! warble boardwalks beaches bars in three part harmony on breezes stirring leaves of memory the perfume
How many times she almost destroyed herself, How she was nothing but molten, constantly flaring, combustible– How she just kept erupting under the weight of her own gravity How alone she felt in what she thought was the darkness between
-after one year in isolation/Feb 2021 We often rose before the light, Mornings after a dream-adorned sleep had calmed the day’s swelter, or the hushed world became encased in snow. We drank black coffee with grace, gently