I am finally admitting
that I am never going to read War and Peace.
I started a number of times,
printed out a cheat sheet with the cast of characters,
made many a tasty snack,
read to around page 100,
and each time abandoned the project.

Sister Barbara has always been drawn to the unknown. In 1965, a week before her eighteenth birthday, she travelled some 400km from Mount Gambier to Adelaide to join the Sisters of Mercy. Her entire family piled into the car and for five hours, Barbara and her siblings sat in the backseat watching lonely farmhouses tear past the window. Barbara had no idea that this would be the first of many long journeys…

The challenge is called Oceans Seven,
and by the time Marcia Cleveland
finished the ginormous feat of swimming
all those channels and straits,
one, two, three, four, five, six, seven,
she indeed earned ownership.
As in, Her Oceans Seven.

It was 1962 in Taiwan, and I was five years old. The dormitory where my family lived had a single living space, with the bedroom raised three feet above the floor, and partitioned by a Japanese paper sliding door. My parents slept on a wooden double bed placed atop the Japanese tatami. Beside them, five children, ranging in age from seven to one, lay side by side on the tatami, sleeping soundly.

The southeast winds blew gently, caressingly, full of medicinal salts, carried in from the Atlantic Ocean, and fragrances from the vegetation on the shorelands that continued to emit spicy intoxicants ahead of the winter solstice. Bella and Beetle, two lovers on the barrier beach, lay within each other’s arms intertwined like one being, warmed by the burning driftwood they had collected and placed in the fire pit Beetle had dug.

That next afternoon I was sitting round home, I heard the bell. A slight, active sound, about the garden. I tried watching TV. The noise got nearer and farther; neither resolved nor ebbed away. This jingling got loud, resilient. It brought me outside.
And there, beneath the magnolia, the most delightful cream and apricot kitten practiced his pounce. The bell at his neck jogged with each strike. Curious, I picked him up. Perhaps used to attention, he didn’t claw but gave a juvenile, inquiring look. Beneath the bell hung a tag etched with a number. I got my phone. “You don’t know me. I have your cat.”
The woman took a second with it. An exploratory silence. “I don’t have a cat.”

Starscape obscured by
countless swarming pixels with 14-inch wingspans;
but no tangible color or form.
No sound, at least none perceived.
But there was something…
a presence felt. No, not felt. Not exactly;…
a presence known by reputation not senses, as mammal, not bird.

I have walked this winding road a thousand times, though I swear it changes its face whenever I return.
Some days it greets me with the quiet of rain-soaked earth, other days with a brittle wind that sounds almost like a voice trying to call me back. I tell myself this is only memory playing tricks but yet memory has always been the wiser of us two.

A hot September
morning flames fire to heaven,
Golden Lucifer.

Anticipation
to culmination: a bloom,
its cacophony.

He never liked smoking. He only liked the smoke—coiling, hovering, just above him,
a downpour held in suspension.
He loved that suspension.
She never liked heels. She only liked the sound they made on the floor—tap, tap, tap.
Like the way her heartbeat quickened whenever she passed his desk.
She loved that quickening.
He liked getting to the office early, making himself a cup of coffee. He would lean back against the wall.

Is there a planet where words silence
a cannon’s demented mouth?

Here, on Earth, furious iron roars
past all reason, past all pleading.
No warding it off
with incantations, prayers,
poetry.

Margie Olivia Murphy studied her desk calendar. She searched for time to verify the sparrow-sized bird with greenish-yellow breast and lavender wings—reported roosting at a nearby park by birding newbies—was the rare orchid oriole. If true, it would be number 748 on her Audubon Life List. She ran a finger down today’s box—2:30 Lena driving lesson/bank, 3:05 doggie day care Izzy pick-up, 3:45 Lena drop-off swim practice, 4:05 call Senator Hewett’s assistant–God update…

Malia wrapped her fingers around the steering wheel. A foggy feeling enveloped her, the same as it had every day this past year. Pushing through the heaviness of insomnia was a daily battle. Highway 406 stretched further than either she or her son John could see. She tried to remember the last time she and her family traveled this highway, but her recollection was interrupted by the pounding in her ears.

“What does it mean to be African American?”
“Why do you ask that question?”
“At school, Sister Gracilda had me fill out a form and she told me to put a check mark next to the word ‘African American.’ Am I African American? What is an African American?”
“It means persons with African blood. Or better put, someone with African genes. Sometimes they’re also called Black.”
“Am I Black?”

The town of Curly had a single billboard, a faded, wind-wavering sign welcoming motorists to the Sandhills town of two hundred and forty-seven residents. There had been a complementary billboard on the opposite edge of town, but a twister had churned through decades ago, obliterating the sign.

For a thousand easy bucks, I could lie all right. I had the gift all great liars had: the uncanny ability to figure out exactly what Herr Other wanted to hear, and if in this case he had a medical degree and a Ph.D. in Psychiatry and ran his own clinic, all the greater the satisfaction would be when I duped him right there on his home turf. I listened carefully to Dr. Berman and proceeded to spew forth fallacies with the reckless abandon of a seasoned mendax.

2018
Dodging cyclists, I scurried across the narrow road and headed toward Gaiole’s town center. A small Tuscan village of twenty-seven hundred souls in the Chianti region, Gaiole is known for its idyllic beauty, and these days for L’Eroica, an increasingly popular vintage cycling event.

We saunter along the shore,
boys trailing behind.
Tender dusk, the wind
a sigh as we skip stones,
stride briskly between
the bulky boulders, climb and leap.

It falls under myth
because it’s the kind no one talks about.
Because Pygmalion grew into something larger than himself, the story touches of marble,
cold and taut, now trope-like and cheap.

By way of the stars,
on the tightrope between the worlds,
the grace of the human form, risen from the sea
into the seer in the seen, kin to all life
across the pale blue dot, to live
in accord with our vision…

The worst thing about my condition was the insomnia, the inability to get a good night’s sleep. I would go to bed early in the evening, exhausted by the torments of the day, and would promptly fall asleep, but by three o’clock in the morning I was fully awake again.

Unlike the others, Greg hadn’t been able to wait until the first game was over to crack open a beer. After two months of sitting in those bleachers, watching through the backstop as his girlfriend Kim’s team played weekly double headers, he needed the beer just to get through the next inning, the next batter, the next pitch. Lately, he’d begun to experience this desperation as anger, even fury, and he couldn’t account for the sheer quantity of it.

The word “Books” has a few meanings in my view. Books could mean the following: a rectangular cover folded in the middle with sewn pages inside it, an item with a story, collection of text in an orderly composition that has a beginning, middle, and end. Reading books, in my opinion, is an escape from reality.

I can’t wipe chartreuse
from my brain, ever since
you used it in a game of Uno
twenty years or so ago
and it’s such a bold shade