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
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
Autumn is the season of dying and death – but life, as in our own experience, carries on. Winter, to me, is the first season of life. In temperate zones, perennial plants, most notably trees, are asleep in winter. Thing is, a lot of infant vegetative color appears throughout theContinue Reading
Hauntings are everywhere in the Appalachian Mountains. Whether one believes in such things or not, a person cannot deny the shivers in the darkness when an owl hoots a soothing sound of wisdom, or the early morning sounds of a house “settling” as it pops and cracks at one endContinue Reading
Detective Gowan stood across from me and fiddled with some recorder. He perked up when another detective entered the room. “Name’s Bob,” he said. “Bob Kroy.” He slid a paper in front of me. “Sign this before you make your statement. Says you’re tellin’ the truth – to the bestContinue Reading
My grandson, Joshua Bathe, passed away last April after being diagnosed with an aggressive cancer five months earlier. The following is my poetic tribute to him. Elegy to a Grandson Grief undulates like an inchworm and just as slowly. It forces one to use the conditional tense: HeContinue Reading
Betty Brewer was my great-aunt, though only four days older than my mother. I never knew Betty. She died before I was born, killed by a jealous wife who caught her husband and Betty in a lover’s tryst at a boarding house rented by the day. Family spoke of BettyContinue Reading
When I was about five years old (before we moved to the holler), my family and I lived in a little green house on a little paved street in Jacksboro, Tennessee. My younger brother and I often felt cramped in our small, grassy yard so we regularly wandered but neverContinue Reading