August, and the PS.104 schoolyard was empty. A good thing. Gave me a chance to develop my pitching arm. And avoid trouble. As a white kid in the South Bronx in 1967, trouble had a way of finding me.

Two days after the moon was full
I walked as in a dreaming.
Over the black seas I yearned to be,
Where the old stars were still bright and gleaming.

Three works in clay by Aleksandra Scepanovic.
Each of these works tells a story of the complexity and beauty found in life’s fractures, embracing the wholeness that emerges through resilience.

I often woke up disoriented, emerging from dreams where everything was as it once was. My former spouse and I were happy again, sharing meals in our favorite restaurants or running together along the Chicago lakefront.

To drive past Coop City late on Saturday night
Is to see what the human worm can weave –
The coral towers stand out their lights against
The pitch-night Sound

The reader fanned the deck of cards on the table and invited me to touch them. With my right hand, I moved them in a circle, counterclockwise and confessed that I was considering abandoning my career.

My head felt like an overripe summer squash.
It was starting out to be a grim day. Though you’d never know it from looking at me, I felt like I had been cloistered all night in an assisted living facility for psychopathic chairs—a command centre for the flotsam of miserable furniture, retired and warehoused, a hub with just enough of a pleasant environment to give the illusion of living in luxury. Night terrors. I struggled to make sense of my present reality. Being a chair had its complications.

The gentleman was always a man of contradictions. Born in the quiet, unassuming town of Nowhere, Tennessee, his early life unfolded amidst the slow rhythms of rural America, where the days stretched on like the endless horizon.

She twirls a slender dagger in her hand, while Egypt’s Pharaoh drinks wine from a golden cup. Seth settles across his cushioned lounge, dark eyes locked firmly on Neferet’s twisting fingers.

Jake tried to kill me, Lizzie had said.
A lie, of course. But she spread it far and wide before she left California for Indiana: He tried to choke me, she’d repeat.
But—Christ!—it was just a hug, and it went down like this:
Hannah had burst into our room, turned on the light, and demanded to know which one of us was taking her to practice. Lizzie kicked me under the sheets—evidently it was my turn—but I kicked her back, club swim had been her stupid idea, just grant me a little rest.

In my earliest memory, I am falling. The last of the afternoon light is nothing but a whisper as dusk makes her provocative entrance—a lingering tease before the dark comes all at once.

The chrysalis comes in grey
matter, some lines of white
to tell the rest of me when
tearing starts.

She sways and watches the dark waters
Her lighthearted hums brings grief to the ears
Beautiful, piercing the silence of the night
Agony riveting like the pain of broken bones

I am lying alone on an operating table. Bright lights are shimmering above my head. I cannot speak. I am surrounded by strangers. People who have met me only moments before. And yet, I am held hostage to their intellect, their experience, their wisdom and their compassion.

His grandparents had gotten drunk on Saphire highballs with friends around the fire the night before, and the way they had started acting strangely—grinning and cackling through the evening, their faces gone somehow wicked and distant…

You knew your father had been having heart problems. Of course, you knew that. But you had not been paying enough attention—not the right kind of attention—to factually comprehend just how critical his condition might have become. In the year following your mother’s death, you were aware that he was paying ever-lessening attention to what she had hopefully called her “heartful, healthful” advice regarding his diet. And he had slacked off his previous daily walking routines and even stopped his weekly bowling league participation.

You’re driving through the beginning of a snowfall that will probably bring at least a foot, the road already white with salt, slippery with cold in some places. The black Chrysler PT Cruiser is a shape a car probably shouldn’t be.

Nothing, I see
But,
dandelion blush and smoky Bardot eyes of western wind. Nothing, but McDonalds and cluster flies…

News of the impending arrival of a word warrior shook the sleepy town of Surrender, New Mexico. For Deputy Sheriff Ingrid Zoe Cole (“Izzy” for short), it didn’t change her routine much, except she took a second glass of bourbon instead of her usual one at lunch.

A simple choice can make all the difference in the world, or so they say. Mary knew what some of the major choices in her life had been. She chose to go to nursing school, despite being told by everyone in her life that she wouldn’t be able to handle it, but she knew that she could. When Hiram got down on one knee, she chose to say yes, although she doubted that they were ready for marriage.

Our time is asynchronous
We have a new favorite pharmacy
A ribbon-cutting you can’t miss! It’s
illegal
to feel

Searching his reflection in the mirror, the sailor saw a subtle change in his own expression. What he saw was longing – a face of someone pursued by memories, haunted by a future he did not want. Now he could see that same expression in others. He thought at first it was enough to know he was not alone, but he realized he had to do something with the insight he had gained. He decided to leave behind his regular life…

“Every black man of genius will eventually be destroyed,” said the Nuyorican widower Irving Rivera as he puffed on a Winston cigarette in the university cafeteria soon after he learned Pedro Albizu Campos had been buried in the Old San Juan Cemetery one hot summer day in 1965.
“Such is the destiny of every ambitious man of African blood wherever and whenever the Anglo-Saxon rules. It shouldn’t surprise you, Susana.

Buddy Morris was moving the last of his stuff out of our cabin and into his old Buick, ready to head down to Denver. He was planning to help friends there open a new music venue, the Harmony Café. I wasn’t going with him.
I was hoping to get the goodbyes over with quickly, but no such luck. Buddy kept pausing his packing to give me advice: where to take the truck if it broke down again, which pile of firewood was best to use first. On and on.