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.

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

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.

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.

Andrea met him nine years ago. She doesn’t remember his name. Was it Mr. Barnes, or Baker, or Bennett? Something that begins with a B. She calls him The Hot Sauce Man.
June 4th Monday (2016)
Andrea drives her yellow Toyota Corolla, a second-hand sedan to the hospital. She parks it. Half of the parking lot is still empty. She walks fast with light steps as if she were floating. Her ponytail in the back flaps.
In three weeks, Andrea will start a new job, a real doctor’s six-figure paying job. At the age of thirty, she feels she has spent all her life in schools and residency training. It’s about time to make a living. The thought of this makes her heartbeat quicken.

At eight thirty on a Tuesday morning, without warning, my love for Esme was evicted by her landlord.
I first met Esme at an outdoor wine bar in Bed-Stuy. A surprising chill had settled that summer night. From the far end of the backyard, my eyes glanced over my untouched glass of white wine, tracing the path of two intersecting string lights, until I saw her

You don’t know me, but if you’re of a certain age, it is very likely that there is a connection between us — a way in which I am a part of you. I want to tell the story of how that came to be, how some amateurs messing around in the backroom of a low-rent novelty store ended up producing a brief national sensation. This is the story of a band from the Detroit suburbs called 24 Radiant Green Umbrellas. This is the story of their accidental hit song — “Strike Anywhere” — which crept onto the Billboard Hot 100 in the summer of 1989. And most of all, this is the story of a drum fill that occurs at precisely two minutes and thirty-five seconds into the song.

I turned twenty-five sometime around five p.m. on August 15th in a five-star restaurant overlooking the marina about seven hours into my thirteen-hour double-shift, and the sun was already setting behind the boats in the harbor casting a golden glow in the main dining room that I knew would turn lavender and then cobalt blue before the windows would become mirrors lit up only by the glow within, and in their reflection I would see five years wasted in this place seating expensively dressed guests at tables I no longer had a seat at…