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.
3.2.2_
Hi. My name = Aioli McCoy. And, first things first, I think this is stupid. And by this, I mean you. Diary. Journal. Thingamajig. Honestly? I’m only writing to make Pauleen (wife) happy. Due to, earlier, when I came home from work, she sat me down, put on serious face like she had big news to share, then handed me this black moleskin.
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
See the little girl sneaking out of her room, across the green shag carpet, down the creaking stairs to the second floor of the tri-level house. Ducking past the large bay window where a meager display of plants are cradled in macrame hangers…
Alone, but not alone. Perched atop an exposed, wind-blown ridge in the Sonoran Desert a few miles north of the Mexican border in Arizona, the graveyard resembles a sepia tone image from the 1930s—slate gray sky, brown land.
Kit Bardot packed her SUV and headed out of the windy city of Chicago. She needed this break—this mini-vacation. She had planned her own way along the infamous Route 66. How far would she go? It didn’t matter. She had told her boss she was taking a much-needed leave of absence.
The house creaked, and with a mighty groan, heaved itself out of a funk, and stood up to meet the sun simmering directly overhead. Cicadas in the yard welcomed it back with a rousing chorus, the first of countless refrains to be heard throughout the sultry day.
“No tree grows all the way to heaven,”
a darling end to a bible story
or Lenten play beginning
you might say;
a betrayal of trust
In the yard on a Tandoor clay oven, Mrs. Hassan cooked dumplings. She stared absentmindedly into the pot at the small lumps of dough that stared back at her like bulging eyes from behind a veil of rising steam.
The two brothers did not sleep that cold September night, for they knew in the morning they would both face the firing squad. One would be executed for having assassinated President-elect Alvaro Obregón, the other simply for being a priest.
Arlo and Ruth Kershaw remained good neighbors. They hired Jesse to do yard work, even though they could have gotten along without the help. He was mowing their back yard on a pleasant, September afternoon when Ruth received a call from Jesse’s Uncle Ray.