Cherry Blossom Forest

Les Femmes Mondiales Black and White
Hurricane
Chicago Ice

Los Angeles to Santa Barbara

To my parents’ dismay, I took full advantage of New York City’s disco era in the late 1970s till the mid-80s. I did go to NYU undergraduate, but if someone asks, “What was your major?” I answer “Night Life.”

Athletic vitality invites gym walls of vivid colors, players spilling onto courts with crimson tones fitting coming contests yet pale walls circumscribe this setting, matching well-worn olive sweatshirts, khaki pants and lemon tees as men of subdued spirit shuffle in beneath torn net strands, symbols of their fall.

I was walking the trails through the oak forest on our property, looking for the pair of pileated woodpeckers I could hear furiously pounding their heads against a tree trunk. My phone rang with a similar rhythmic urgency in my pocket, as though in conversation with the woodpeckers.

She disappears
takes with her
something created together
I move forward to where she stood
the absence of her presence
leaves behind a vacuum

The possible face stares back at me
from across the weedy, ragged backyard,
its dark grey oval rising from the darker
striated bark of the sweetgum.

In the galaxies pooling in the waiting room
where black holes hum the prelude
to creation
we chart the shushed diagnosis
embossed in the orbit of
the body’s forgotten comets.

My mother’s white handkerchief
lies on my hand, the corners
embroidered with small flowers,
pink, blue, white. I unfold it
and find the yellow feather,
where I put it eighty years ago.

Marching men in uniforms, crisp
Navy-blue shoulders, starchy stiff
Polyester and pins
Bagpipes gasp and gather
The strength to carry the day

Something was different when Danny closed the wooden picket gate behind him at Aunt June’s. The first thing he noticed was an odd smell, something mixed in with the pines along the path.

Epicurus the Greek philosopher
tells me not to fear death.
He goes, Why should you fear death?
If you are, then death is not.

Six-year-old Craig insisted on wearing his t-ball jersey, a too-large purple pullover that advertised Mim’s Pharmacy out front and sported the number 8 on its back.

Once, in another time, I traveled with my parents
In the 1951 Ford sedan to a distant part of the city.
You could call it a city, but everyone then
Referred to it only as a town.

Miss Donna’s laugh has the unconscious sincerity that makes your throat catch and your stomach sink, like she’s just confessed something deeply personal. I picture her as a robust lady with broad shoulders and strong workers’ arms.

A hot string of up-moves through positions of increasing responsibility and compensation landed Charlene Posey a job interview in 2007 with Craig Baker. They sat in his office directly opposite each other in matching visitors’ chairs with seats too shallow for his six-four frame.

The hawk’s shadow follows me.
Some smoker’s tar coats my lungs,
all the tiny quivering sacs.

This essay is not meant to be a work of literary criticism, but as a guide to beginning writers about structure in a short story and how they can approach it when they write.

Solitary star’s light cleaves predawn sky. Morning’s mourning starts. Eyes fill in striking silence. Departed thumping, crunching, sipping, crackling, pouncing, yelping, woofs and wags of canine elder years seem bound within that star.

In my room at my desk, I startle at the front door’s metallic cracking shut. It’s Monday and she’s left for work, the workaday routine of teaching high-school Biology. Without a goodbye, which she trills when happy, calls expectantly when fairly content, speaks normally when resigned to the daily grind.

Fiona, nude, sweaty and spent, tries to block out the voices in her gut and in her mind screaming, don’t go back to Tucker, because he’s gonna beat you black and blue.

I have never deified my older brother, Eddy, in the way younger siblings often worship their older counterparts. I didn’t have a desire to follow him around like a lost puppy, demanding to tag along on adolescent excursions. For one thing, he was four years my senior.

Like a cross stitch
I tied down your limbs
thread by thread
preventing you from flying