Sometime around 1912, twenty-two-year-old Great Aunt Annie took a photo of Mayme and Beth, two of her younger sisters, standing on opposite sides of an unnamed friend. They were all eating apples at the same time. Annie framed the scene with her camera then snapped the photo, capturing their impish goofiness on black-and-white film. The smiles hidden by the apples show in their eyes.
Ninety years later, in February 2002, I was hiking with my three daughters,

The water began to rise from the soil three days after the storm passed. By then, the rest of the valley and the neighboring town had become feverish again with the heat of early summer, and all remnants of rain had completely disappeared. It was a thing of magic, the townspeople said when they finally drove the five miles into the lowlands of the valley to see it with their own eyes. Water seeping from the depths of the earth.

Evelyn’s caramel colored
fingertips rub center of an orchid.
Soft saturated purple petals

awaken her eyes, like discovering
carving of ancient writings.
The Nile River on cave walls.

These few days, the assassination of the CEO of UnitedHealthcare has become the center of attention of the media, and the talking points extend to the injustice of America’s private insurance system introduced to patients. I am staying in Taiwan now since September and have gone through the healthcare treatment many times for my injured knee and chronic problem of Spondylolisthesis. I would like to talk about my own experience enjoying a healthcare system that’s totally different from America’s.

Eileen can feel the heat on her neck and smell the group of sweaty teenagers sitting five seats ahead of her on the city bus. They speak in a lingo that mocks her thirty-six accumulated years of practicing proper grammar. One of them stands in the aisle with his legs spread out for balance and talks about escaping the matrix. His friend, wearing a gigantic hoodie, looks around the bus, glances at Eileen and then looks to the side as if to roll his eyes at his friend.

Are you listening? I have access
to all the words, at least

hypothetically. Language, emotion,
cognition commingles in combinations

infinite, experiments replicable,
but only barely, in theory

The 2024 presidential election’s over: I’m starting to sleep better again; my blood pressure is returning to normal. It didn’t surprise me that Donald Trump won the election; it just appalled me.
It didn’t surprise me that during the campaign, Trump supporters saw those of us that opposed his election to president as the enemy; nor did it surprise me that we saw Trump supporters as stupid, naïve pawns.
It did surprise me, though, to learn that my girlfriend was the enemy.

The one-way bus ticket eats up a big chunk of his earnings and leaves him with just enough cash for a quick fix when he gets home—something to take the edge off while he figures out what to do about his stolen car. His mind is clouded with these thoughts as he climbs on the idling coach under the cover of the late November afternoon gloom. The driver pays him no mind, but a pair of elderly women near the front make their displeasure known, clucking their tongues in unison as he shuffles past. He gets it.

Walking at dusk again,
and stray lines tap
on my mind’s window,
looking for a poem.

I’ve always been afraid of the dark. It’s strange, I know. Mermaongs are supposed to be adventurous. We’re meant to love every part of the ocean—from its glittering surface to the rotting hull of a drowned ship, to the thrill of the Deep Dark, where the blind fish and the shadows with teeth live. There is always some measure of dark: the shadow of fish or sharks, a cloud passing overhead, the shape of something in the distance.

The moment we turn the corner,
a cold front hits,
a carpet of chilly air
unrolled at our feet.
I pull my cardigan tightly
around my chest, hold it closed.

A generation of kids wanders into a DIY venue and gets their fill of drugs relevant to their generation and locale. Blues, speed, blow in Denver it’s cheap grass. And the ever-present booze. Piles and piles of discarded PBR, Miller High Life, and Rolling Rock cans with a few of the well-off kids’ craft beers thrown in for good measure. An aluminum salvager’s wet dream.

The setting:
Notes in a measure of motion
with dissonant zinc-white daylight splashing
and dancing upon the path
as the horizon softens to a bluer hue, and vanishes

Where are you? the seven-year-old in me
asks as I watch the screen fill
with frenetic red and orange,
billowing gray, curtained black.
Storm, come and still the winds.
Jean Gray, divert the water.

We scooped up the baby,
ramrodded the four year old,
imprisoned the two gray tabbies,
locked them all in the ‘77
white LTD with the green vinyl interior
left to me by my mother upon her death.

Disrupting the murmuring stillness,
the nasally whine of a two-stroke motor,
hedge trimmers whipsawing

weeds framing sidewalk, infiltrating

Life came out of me
a gush of red
Moon-pale I waited those eternal
stretched seconds
for my
arms to be filled
with you.

These arguments, the silences, were all a slow release

a practice run to make the death of us
this love we had, a little easier to finish.

We have come apart, the skin of us slide

to be faceless, naked, the bones of us stand free

Outskirts of a mining town in northern Minnesota
August 1990
A ten-year-old girl named Ursula Dahl chases after a porcupine behind her mother’s trailer, her frizzy red hair sparkling in the late-summer light. The animal escapes through a wild raspberry patch, but the child refuses to give up.

Empty as the space
on the back of my neck

where the phantom of your
hand rests just

outside the confines of
my comfortable reach

To respect the privacy of the person I’m going to tell you about, I’ve given him the alias Dr. Theodore J. Ammon. If I tell his story well, after you’ve read it you will ask yourself whether you have known people whose lives have been affected in a similar way by the experiences of their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents.

The night is a black dress

draped over the arms of a couch, she whispers
stars plucked like cherry blossoms.
A smokey hush fills the room

David Harris stood at the front of a group of about fifty protesters gathered in a church parking lot just east of a strip of I-43 designated as Jeannetta Simpson-Robinson Memorial Highway just north of downtown Milwaukee. He was closely listening to the instructions being given by a young woman wearing a black T-shirt with I Can’t Breathe printed in large, white, block letters across the chest.

Nestled in the Adelaide Hills, Father John’s home is warm and inviting. Outside, the trees are dampened by the winter rains. The sky is dark although it is only midday. John sits in a blue armchair by the heater. Green plants surround us in the living room where we sit.