His breath is bad: cigarettes and agitated solitude. He stands outside his car excavating shrapnel from his hand, vestiges of a lawnmower blade sharpened cruelly, sparks taking revenge as metal glazed in splinters. The VA doctor, to whom he resents going, says he is lucky the constant picking has notContinue Reading
Halfway up the mountain, just below the broken down garage where the tractor and the rusted truck were kept, in an interior dominated by grease, dust, patina and ageless imprint of mountain people generations removed from the old country, a young boy would sit in thunderstorms brought by Norse gods,Continue Reading
I spy my love along the ridge, a silhouette in shadows of black. I stand with my heart a breakin’ ‘fore I fear he’s not coming back. We were to be married this autumn but the war broke out in June. With brothers at odds in the fighting, I fearContinue Reading
**On a mobile device, this poem is best viewed using landscape orientation. As a child raised right on the buckle of the bible belt, each June I could be found buried in the basement of a church singing Jesus loves me, and stringing salvation bracelets. One strand of leather, 6Continue Reading
I long to lie in the thick apple moss, hemmed in by doghobble, leafy liverwort at my feet, lichen like a lacy pillow under my head, covered by a canopy of sugar maple and red buckeye, butterfly ghosts of beech leaves fluttering above. If I were very, very quiet, wouldContinue Reading
I cannot watch war movies. In my mind’s eye, I interpose my father trudging through rice paddies in Vietnam, trudging through tall grass so thick, it slices the skin. I see his small frame – just a boy – whose uniform in later years fit his 13-year-old grandson. I seeContinue Reading
From his window view my son seizes a ribbon of morning light that gives him excuse to pause, take measure of the ochre mist shrouding the still-dark presences of trees. He’s riddled in his chest by the sight of rocks splitting the sun’s head, now a wobble on the mountain’sContinue Reading
As a poet I have learned to approach syrupy topics, (tears, grandmothers and any thing that dances), with caution. But I am old enough to be a grandmother, and it just so happens both of mine could dance like hell and drive grown men to tears. One danced from DonegalContinue Reading
They waited for me before they took him. I closed the car door, slogged past family, noted the numbed, distant faces and swollen, zoned eyes; passed the old country roses, sweet and sundry; passed his hand-crafted shed that smelled of fresh cedar, heard the bustle of birds all around, aflutter.Continue Reading
With trepidation; I approached my childhood Appalachian home, a shack really, high above the railroad tracks. The sole remaining object was the toilet, standing forlorn among the broken shards of rotten wood. A toilet, ironically, that we were never allowed to use, when there was a perfectly good leaf availableContinue Reading