Tilted
I went into work two hours late today although I had no business going in there at all. But I kept thinking back to when you had that tooth infection and the whole side of your face was swollen and soft and your pupils pulsed with your heart rate, pumping the pain through your head.…
Read MoreOde to Brown
Brown. My real hair color. Yes, really.Brown. Everybody’s skin to some degree.Brown. Cacao beans. Care-uh-male.Unsalted cashews. Pistachio shells.W.E.Brown Dubois.Marcus Browney.Spike Brown movies.Brown. Almost purple. Sometimes green. One-third of the camouflage cow.The trunk of the tree of the knowledgeof good and evil.The roadmaps on our palms. Oil spill in the Gulf.Waterlogged sand between my toes. Brown…
Read MoreMy Walmart Self
I’ve always loved rubies. Ever since I was a child. It’s not just the fact that Ruby is my name and that rubies are my birthstone. It also has something to do with growing up in northeast Iowa—and all that Wizard of Oz crap that everyone else seems to think so much of—If happy little…
Read MoreOn Breaking and Mending
I remember every day that I know nothing.I patch the holes at the knees and dress minor wounds.There is no good place to sit and watchthe trees rattle in the wind,so I ask you to run with a branchlike a kite behind you so I can hear that whoosh,but mind the holes where the dog…
Read MoreTwo Poems
Sonata for Water and Birds Each day becomes another and. Monday comes, dies away,then Tuesday and Wednesday, and summer fadesin the gray wash of autumn. Today is a little Unitarian churchwhere everyone is welcome andeveryone believes us, buteach day joins the world’s cathedral of time. Moments are the common books we paste ourselves into.Every second…
Read MoreCars
My parents were born into a world mostly without cars, but that changed rapidly. When I asked my mother about those cast iron hitching posts that still stood along Western Avenue, she said they were just something no longer needed and would soon be gone forever. Cars were the big thing, everybody had to have…
Read MoreTwo Poems
Motherhood I want to want this.So, make me a blood orange, ripe enough to peel,pared down to the pith by a kitchen knife, the reddenedflesh pouring into whatever light there is—pull me taut as a tendon in my ownindelible sheath, weighted curl loopingthrough my belly, ache that can’tbe rubbed away. Settle in my bones,marrow sponged…
Read MoreComposing with Light | Five Photographs
Two Poems
Gold Babies They cry for hours,bundled like cobsof corn in deep summer. I shake things for them, coloredrings just above their noses.It only angers them more. Always you find them milk-filled,their cribs scooted to the best windows.They can see it all—the cotton sheep, the fat little peaches. They are offended by such comforts.They are offended…
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