In the quiet darkness of her backyard, Annemarie sat in wonder, gazing at the brilliance of a full moon. A “super moon” technically, though she couldn’t remember at the moment what its special name was tonight… Harvest moon? Hunters moon? It didn’t matter. The beauty was positively hypnotizing as the moon dazzled like a jewel, with twinkling stars sprinkled all around it in the perfect, clear night sky. Its glow illuminated the woods with gentle moonbeams filtering down between the trees.

The police separated us into two cop cars. One car contains Stephen and Hugh; my boyfriend Matthew and I ride in a separate car. They didn’t handcuff us, but they certainly looked me up and down with disdain. I’m feeling overwhelmed and lightheaded because just before the police came, Hugh shoved his marijuana on me. He told me to hide it in my underwear because “they won’t search a girl.” I complied but questioned my judgement. And now I’m on my way to the police station feeling like a captured bird.

In 2022, I wrote an essay for Soundboard: The Journal of the Guitar Foundation of America, but my name was misprinted in the print edition as Vish S. Watson. No great tragedy, these things happen.
In 1907, Israel Baline, a singing waiter in the Bowery, penned “Marie, From Sunny Italy,” but when the handbills accidentally attributed it to I. Berlin, Baline liked the name, thought it had a classy ring, and promptly adopted it, upgrading the “I” to Irving.
I myself have no aspirations for fame or fortune and no thoughts of upgrading my name.

With every passing Christmas, my sons and their families spend less and less time in the house before hurrying back to their own homes. I will not see them again until the next Christmas, when they will reluctantly come again to honor the childhood promise that they made on their mother’s deathbed: to always keep in touch. Only then will the house see some life, this big empty house that they’ve given me so they don’t have to live with me.

And in Venice, spring!
priest manqué
Baron Corvo’s pimping presence
passes by,
on the lookout for the right boys.
Oh che bel divertimento!

In 1970, the year the world learnt that the Beatles would split, Sister Carole decided to join the Daughters of Charity. It was like a love affair, she tells me as we meet over Zoom, a day after a statewide COVID-19 lockdown had been announced. Carole’s love affair was less dramatic compared to one of the most famous love affairs at the time — the romance between John Lennon and Yoko Ono (who married the year before) — but for Carole, it would be her lifelong love.

The old woman, Ramona, like her umbrella, was from another time, a slower, quieter time, a time she missed. Despite a tight grip, the umbrella inflated above her hoary head, twisting in howling gusts. Cold raindrops plentiful as her days pin-pricked her eyes. Her feet shifted to avoid puddles but not fast enough, and her socks were soaked, and her feet soggy and cold.
I am only halfway to the grocery store. What a day, what clima!

I take the cobbled path through town
that I have walked for years.
The streets are for the wary—
ice strewn here and there
as if they had tired
of the nagging shovels.
The air still
with the silence of February.

I am the only passenger leaving the train at Oxford station. The platform is deserted and there’s a sharp chill in the air. The sky’s a dull white sheet. I sit on my roller bag, button up my cardigan and look around for Chrissy Sondheim. She said she’d be on the platform holding a card with my name on it. The silence is almost deafening. I think about the many times I came to Oxford when Alba was a student and how close we were. It had been the two of us against the world from the moment I gave birth to her.

Goddesses of Rage and Despair
objects of desire
and hate
Did they drown in their own beauty?
curse their amber eyes and
silk thighs
gasping for air

It’s 7:30 A.M. Xavier walks up to his office building and stops. Later that morning he must give a sales presentation to a prospective client. As he goes through the revolving door, he tries on a wary smile. His personal black dog is back. My Black Dog. That’s what Churchill had called his depression. The truth is that Xavier’s Black Dog rarely leaves him. When his dog isn’t biting, she is sitting on his heart like a forty-pound dumbbell balanced precariously. Could a heart that weighs maybe a pound support a forty-pound dumbbell? No! Of course not! It would be crushed.

As this afternoon the cotton candy clouds share space with azure sky, I surmise that God above does not abide the lie that Hamas’ savage strike justifies the Israeli government’s genocide.

Widows, orphans, strangers bear the brunt of extreme and arbitrary force. Displaced tented families eke out day by day survival, searching bomb-razed hospitals and schools for children’s charred remains.

He arrives on horseback middle of a blizzard
in the Rockies, boots on, to collect me. There
is a valley of snow between us. He says nothing
about seeing the parole officer. I’m inside a lodge
with a roaring fire, legion of kin, we’re playing
Texas no hold’em and Scrabble with occasional…

The idea of “necessary evil”
Is only plausible if you
Mistakenly equate evil with pain.
Reject the premise, then
Evil is never necessary.

Pain, on the other hand, is a different story
For human life to even exist
There is the matter of the
Pain of childbirth

I float in the pond
on my blue mat,
splash away deer flies,
close my eyes in the baking sun.
The mat deflates, I am
half in the water, legs and head
cradled on the remaining air.

While it was dark,
(and hellishly cold!)
the earth a frozen stone,
I dreamt of loam
and pomegranates,
and a warm, green shore,
and a boat to ferry me home.

If you ever happen to be in St. Louis, and you take Highway 40 to the western edge of the city, you will spy, looming above the Clayton Road exit, the world’s largest Amoco sign. Forty feet tall, sixty feet wide, the sign is so big and so bright that, according to local legend, pilots once used it to guide their flights in and out of Lambert Field.

One would think seeing red flags in a relationship would make a logical, intelligent person walk away. But in the mirage, sweet temporary moments and beautiful, empty promises keep a sensitive, people-pleasing, empathetic soul hanging on. One begins to romanticize the situation, seeing the red flags as something to be fixed with patience and extra love. Feeling the “right” thing to do is prove unwavering love, loyalty and strength to ultimately win the prize of earning reciprocation.

The third eye opens. Treasure:
How dry linen pops into flame
With spark and magic instant.
In the sweet live dark the trees drip life.

Today is not one of Harold’s better days. He’s fed up with Susan again. “You just stand there in the corner all day!” he shouts when she appears, which is pretty much a result of whatever’s going on in Harold’s mind at any given time. “Talk to me!” he commands. “Why won’t you talk to me?” It relaxes him to see her and he yearns to fall into the comfortable cadences they had for the ten years they were married before she died. When it doesn’t happen, he becomes frustrated and angry the way he is today.

Dear Tom,
When we met all those years ago in Belize, we were doing the Lord’s work, though few of us in that outfit were people of faith. We were working in the Lord’s vineyards and also drinking in the vineyards and having love affairs in the vineyards and generally thinking too highly of ourselves in the vineyards and away from the vineyards.

The Hare Krishnas would be coming out in good time to sing and dance for everyone and everything. I was eight in the summer of 1985, vacationing with my silent generation relatives in Ocean City, MD, in an apartment on First St. at The Haven Hotel. Poppy knew how much I loved to sing and dance. He got some bells.

In her thirty-two years, Claudette had managed to date one man who might just have been the one. Charlie was a boyishly handsome, fun-loving, fully employed, and emotionally stable paralegal in a big firm working his way through law school at night at Oklahoma City University. The couple dated for about a year and were talking about moving in together when Charlie unexpectedly stopped by the apartment Claudette shared with her mother.

You can call me a comforter
emitting essential oils
like quiet sighs, silk-washed
in tears silent as the ear of a baby.