I score my first soccer goal ever. It’s only practice, but still. Coach claps and shouts, “Way to go, Henry!” A couple of teammates jog by in these knee-high, stretchy blue socks we have to wear, saying, “Good job, Gollum,” and “Finally,” and kind of laughing.
My parents made me play because they said I spend too much time on my aquarium. I made it like how the ocean was before, with colored reefs and glowing fish and huge whales.
Paradigm Shift
Holy light fills window’s tree at dawn. Autumn leaves as angels embrace our white-haired God. There is peace as people sleep. I pray. May heart’s compassion bridge mental walls to unite and not divide. The youthful idealism mourned in my bones with Gandhi’s maxim to “be the change you wish to see in the world” mandates clarity: what values dear to me must I enact to infuse good where I can?
“Abduction on the Canyon Rim Trail,” “Hair Stylist,” and “Martin”
I don’t expect
a soupy river to steal you away.
White blood cells explode into whitewater,
filaments of breath sweep
downstream.
A confounding disappearance into
the thundering confluence.
My Whole Heart
My son’s kindergarten teacher was a big, bearded man, generous with hugs and laughter. His old-school version of early education focused on teaching kids how to love each other and share, how to be kind to each other and silly together. He taught them to run and fetch a seat for a visitor and to pay compliments to everyone.
“The Long March,” “Sunday Sunday,” and “Marie”
Bound on some skillful retreat,
a long march
north and west;
cut off from the rest
we end up foraging
in some scanty orchard,
the two of us.
You Are Your Only Competition
During my initial days of running, I’d look at the runners on the road and wonder why I was not as fast as them. Bitten by the competitive bug, I’d try and match up to their speed and experience a temporary high of overtaking them until all the air was sucked out of my lungs. The pain of watching them run past me was nothing compared to the injuries and niggles I faced later.
“Duncan’s Point Along Highway 1,” “A Poem Without Poetry,” and “Nightfall”
I.
Purple delosperma frozen on stone cliffs
windswept granite.
Permanent calligraphy on blue canvas
only tides change.
II.
Carved into a driftwood bench
three names now forgotten.
Don’t Want to Go to Heaven; Just Want to Go Home
Inside the airport, Trina sat in a white rocking chair that had been set up on the side of the ramp, looking out at the tarmac, a coffee in one hand, a Danish with bright red jam and stripes of white icing in the other, her carry-on bag at her feet. Behind her was the hubbub of the terminal, arrivals and departures, announcements calling out flight numbers, transport carts carrying the elderly here and there, a young man wearing a slick blue suit and a pilot’s hat trying to convince passersby to sign up for a special program.
“oh physics,” “Messages,” and “Elfie’s Quantum Thoughts”
oh physics
of warped gluons in the matrix chromosomes
molding children with necks and knees
disjoint and attenuate physics of the transport
of chlorophyll far more certain
than law or reason
and the stopped blood of embryos
Almahdi
The conversion was an unlikely story.
For over two decades, Professor Philippe Halston had been the rock star at Rudyard University’s history department who brought in grants, acclaim, students, and visiting lecturers from afar, an expert on the Enlightenment and pre-Industrial Revolution secular European thinking. He lived an immaculate life with an immaculate house and an immaculate career untainted by failure.
“Self Portrait as Poet,” “Work Friends,” and “Now Playing”
Poet, you mama’s girl, so bad at volleyball, first dates, job interviews, your
albatross of asymmetry flung floorward like an eloquent glove, ironic as that yellow
pedestrian yield sign on Chestnut Street, permanently pavement-flattened.
“Early Envy (1956)” and “Fantasy Football”
When he’s eight he envies neighbor/buddy Bobby his airline pilot father
who drives his eye-popping harlequin Ford Thunderbird
with gears-a-poppin’ engine roarin’ to and from Idlewild
before and after taking off into the wild blue yonder.
Umbrellas on Water
After her dad died, Aveline swore to herself she wouldn’t let his novel go unfinished. It had taken two weeks for the brain fog to wear off and another two after that before she’d recovered from the shock of losing him to do anything, but even now, six months later, she struggled to get any real work done. Her progress through his notes was slow to the point of agony.
Purple Becomes Deirdre
The year she turned fifty, there were two men in Deirdre’s life: Tom and Diego. Tom was an organic farmer she met at the Open-Air Market, where he sold honey, eggs and produce on Saturday mornings. In the photograph on her refrigerator door, Tom beams at Deirdre over a mound of sweet corn. He is ruggedly handsome with a shy farm boy smile that never failed to make her feel weak.
Missing Pieces
My uncle was there. He was angry.
“Look at yourself,” he said, punctuating his words with his finger. “Pathetic. Grown man, fooling around with kids’ stuff. House looks like a bomb site. You’ll never get a woman in a dump like this, boy.”
I sat squarely in the straight-backed chair, feet planted, shoulders pressed against the wooden slats. Chin up, eyes front, not moving a muscle.
Sold in Saigon
Adorned with snaring water lilies, her blood-red dress dripped down to her ankles, conservatively hiding her nearly porcelain-white skin; the only skin revealed were her perfectly slender hands and her bisected head—she had no nose, no eyes, no ears, no brain, and no consciousness.
Although her head ended right below her eyes, like the top half was sliced off clean, she still stood taller than all the Vietnamese women in the shop.
A Cypress Tree Has No Shadow: Chapter Two
ALLENBY had originally been designed by an Ottoman Empire army engineer to impress the future. At first glance, the barracks looked magnificent: a pile of chiseled stone comprising two tall upper stories stacked above a main floor, each of the wings spreading at least two city blocks to form a massive, four-sided citadel. Justina knew from old photographs seen in Vienna that the wings enclosed a vast courtyard, a setting for military parades or a bloody last stand.
The Poison Hill
The photograph was square, with white edges, taken with their father’s camera last summer at the lake. Gertrude remembered it well: Louis had posed in his swimsuit, one hand on his hip.
But since then, someone had scribbled all over the picture. Large, crude loops of rough blue ink elaborated her brother’s swimsuit, flaring his trunks into a skirt and blotted his head with frizzy curls, flapper-short.
The Snitch
When Javan was around ten years old, his parents took him and his brother to Orchard Beach. It was Javan’s first trip to the beach. The night before the trip, he couldn’t fall asleep. He crawled into bed with his parents and asked them questions. He asked his parents to explain how the beach was made and if it was safe to go there. He asked them why people said the sand at the beach was white when it was really tan.
Autobiography of the Bomb: Chapter One
You may think you know me but you don’t. Our acquaintance only goes so far. You see how I act, but you do not know my thoughts and feelings. You do not know me from the inside. And so I often feel misunderstood and unfairly judged. You can infer a great deal about people from their actions. But literature confers one great advantage over life. It allows you to see a person as if from within. Perhaps this is only illusion.
The Scoutmaster’s Ultimatum
Mom and Dad brought me to Camp Bramble because they said I was too sad. They said I could come home when I stopped being sad. That was when I knew that I might never see them or home again.
I was eleven years old and couldn’t remember not being sad. Although I couldn’t have given you an explanation as to why. Maybe I just wasn’t satisfied with any answers that people had given me over the last decade.