Cover art by Mighty Marmot Art © 2023
|
Bite-Sized Stories
|
Greener Pastures // Poetry
“How reassured those nomads must have felt to know they would be buried on their / beloved steppe… We don’t know where to go. Few of us know where our ancestors lie, or where / we’ll be buried ourselves, if at all.”
A Tiny Town with a Large Cemetery // Creative Nonfiction
“I know the way: walk straight back into the oldest part of the cemetery until you reach a low stone wall. Sit on it and look in front of you to see where my family is buried… Stones with writing, stones with writing effaced, stones with unfamiliar names, stones with names of people I knew and loved… Every time I visit, it seems that nothing has changed. But that’s not true. My aunt lies there now, joining her husband, who died before I was born. Once or twice, I have seen other people. I think. In my memory, they gradually fade into the trees, into the stones, into their own families.”
Sometimes I Don’t Know What My Autistic Nephew Means // Poetry
“but I tell him / both of his great grandfathers’ eyes, / two different storms, / one over the river, the other over all / these rugged hills.”
Footsteps // Poetry
“The Big Bang was quiet / as an empty house. / Just a lightbulb coming on / in a darkened room… A letter in the mailbox. / A black cat in the window.”
Theo, Stuck in Twine // Creative Nonfiction
“We often wonder about how our alpacas’ inner lives. They are intelligent and curious, often coming to meet us at the fence when we go out to the pasture, but they are more invested in their herd than in us. Our dinner table looks out into their enclosure, and sometimes we catch them watching us, but we are an afterthought, a curiosity—the creatures who bring them hay. Do they trust us? Do they like us? The alpacas are not our friends. We farm them, but they really belong to each other.”
Blackberries // Creative Nonfiction
“On returning as an adult, it’s clear one could easily just stride across this trickle of dirty water, but at the time it seemed like our only hope was to skitter across the loose collections of two-by-fours and planking built by some mysterious grownups, probably from an ancient civilization. Beyond the creek lay Frankenstein’s Graveyard, an outcropping of gray, flaking shale. The somber pile of slick, gray stone for some reason reminded us of the monster’s last resting place.”
Uncultivated // Poetry
“We ran to steal pears / impossibly sweet… We took what we loved inside us / and kept it through the year. / When we passed each other / in a hallway or mall, / we’d give a brief, affirming nod.”
Esphyr Slobodkina // Fiction
“The peddler feels for his caps, but they are not there. ‘All he felt was his own checked cap.’ We both look around us, as the peddler looks around. Then we look up at my bookshelf, the one that holds half autism books and half my all-time favorite books… The books that got me through school and college and Oren’s diagnosis, and then his father leaving after we moved to Israel. We’re still there, we’re still close to Oren’s dad’s family, only they’re not my family anymore. The books are my family.”
Apple Trees in Etowah // Poetry
“I want to walk among them… that scrap of song, the one that echoes… But hidden / some strayed piece of my heart / in the hall of my mouth, I taste the harvest.”
Without The Sound Of Fear // Poetry
“It is all quiet now -- / the outside world, the inside too. / The wind has pushed itself down / close to the foundation of the house… we realize, we never listened to it, / though its always there, / always has been -- under everything.”
No Eye // Poetry
“Because no eye is… on the sparrow / the doors all swing / without ever ceasing… the getting through / how it brands us / in our frailty we are / not without fault… yet there still is an exhalation”
The Dead Walk // Poetry
“My dead are planted / elsewhere, my parents / in a hard clay country / cemetery in southern / Alabama, my husband / scattered along the scruffy / armpit of the Florida shore / where we were married.”
Marbles // Poetry
“stood / on my toes… until / I saw it, one single marble, light blue and wispy / like the ocean on a perfect summer morning / right where it meets the horizon, like the sweetest / dream you’ve ever had, only a few moments / before waking / when all you’ve ever wished for seems so close”
Between Landslides // Poetry
“You seem to know how this hill stood / before the gardens, the chimneys, the children / in swings and afternoon laughter… You foretell a scattering of pots / and urns / when this house is no longer / the slow decent into wetland and swamp, / the river then a sea.”
Homecouver // Creative Nonfiction
“I stare at the shades of gray as if to see through the clouds for the lives further east: the one I’ve actually lived, all the possible ones should I have stayed. That middle-school self is moving not by the better life he aspired to hold tight—not better in hindsight—but by his posture, standing and longing.”
A Dream About My Mother // Poetry
“Some mothers are furious volcanoes— you never know when they will erupt. / Some mothers are distant ice-storms; there’s no mother there at all. / There are children playing in the road. / Balls, jump ropes, a plastic bat. / Some mothers make very small lives and then live them… I have had each of these mothers, sometimes. / Other times, none.”
Social // Fiction
CW: mentions of hazing, substance abuse, sexual assault
Author note: While this is a work of fiction, the content depicts actions and outcomes that sadly have occurred on college campuses for decades.
“Many of them freshly held the memory of their own move-in day, just weeks earlier, when the brothers of Pi Gamma would chant at departing parents from the fraternity house porch, ‘Don’t Leave Your Daughter! Don’t Leave Your Daughter!’… He was alone. What could he piece together? Very little at first… If he were to see her on campus, he’d have to decide whether to smile, wave, or just avoid her altogether… [Dad’s] talking about his college days; he’s talking about being reckless. He’s asking questions that I can’t answer and wouldn’t want to answer to him, even if I did know. I feel broken.”
(Genesis 8:11) // Poetry
“when he lifts his face / to ask if he can have / a brother or a sister… on my afternoon walk / a robin lay dead on the path… Child, my mouth is full of olive / leaves, yet I have no / place to land.”
The Spider Plant // Fiction
“Alex said he didn’t care if I slept in that office, so long as I could find myself again … ‘Give it some time,’ he said…. Clumps of dirt raced each other toward the drain and disappeared. Droplets of water glistened on the plant’s leaves. When I found my breath, I swore the leaves were green again.”
The Far Hope // Poetry
“It’s why I keep watering the wilting mums / every morning. Finding books / I’m not looking for… Maybe the recipe / is less screen time and more / interesting animal facts. Mirror neurons. / Staying focused with an infant crying / in my hands. Becoming the old man / who can identify trains by whistle signals.”
In Time, Everything Rises // Poetry
“Each banana a finger / from a flower, each row of fingers a hand sliced / into bunches and blue bagged for transport …Like that downed plant / which in time rises to bloom again, today I dress, drive / to the store to buy the vanilla I need.”
Smoked Fish on a Saturday // Fiction
“In my mind, I don’t rush out the door. I see myself accepting the menu from the scowling waiter, entering at a measured pace, taking in my surroundings. I am seated and I order the fish platter, though I know it’s far more than I can possibly eat by myself… In my mind, I am transported, awash in memory and nostalgia. In my mind, it is precisely as I want it to be.”
Spring Tree Picking // Poetry
“In June, the grandsons arrive, fresh / from another school year, clamoring / for their grandfather’s attention… In buoyant mood, he teases the boys, / says they must be cautious, make sure / the tree doesn’t lift upward with Mary Poppins / hanging from its trunk.”
Gaze // Poetry
“The turmeric poppy / rolls up at night like a scroll, / and unrolls at dawn / for the bees to read… the roster of historic invaders… muse that they were all long gone, / while we, he’d say, / (may he rest in peace) / we are all still here.”
Poem for Willy Silber // Poetry
“Willy Silber, nice, quiet boy / whose parents owned a bakery, / or they lived above a bakery-- / there was some connection / with a bakery, the smell of bread / in the oven, she said.”
Memories // Poetry
“It’s not only the buildings that were / destroyed in Kyiv, but the dreams / that made them, an apartment… / family photos on the ground, / so many that she gathered them up / because she wanted to meet the people / in them and share their stories.”
Futures Come And Go // Poetry
“Under unfamiliar stars, / beneath the hours’ red contempt, / at the death of the mile — / how much longer”
Leaving the Boxes // Poetry
“The boxes, they mocked me, / there in their corner, gathering / their dust, judgmental as a parlor aunt… Let the dumped yellowing scraps / drift where they may. For today… an air-kissed, downy, windborne white pinion—”
The Long Goodbye: An Affair of the Heart // Creative Nonfiction
“I realized I could choose to be proud of her. My mother was loving, sweet, and friendly and, each time she embarked on her nursing monologue, I saw her audience move from confusion to realization to kindness, listening and smiling until I gently pried her away. Then we’d sit at our table, I’d explain the menu, and she’d flirt with the waiters. My mother’s true nature had emerged. Unplugged from the past, it was beautiful.”
Until Then, the Garden // Fiction
“People just do not realize what it is like to care for a sweet someone, who is almost always living far away in the past… in Emily's mind, she is walking to work, or taking the kids to school, or going shopping. She often takes things from other people’s rooms because she is in a place where that magazine belongs to her, or she was borrowing that tape dispenser from someone’s office to take it back to her own.”
“How reassured those nomads must have felt to know they would be buried on their / beloved steppe… We don’t know where to go. Few of us know where our ancestors lie, or where / we’ll be buried ourselves, if at all.”
A Tiny Town with a Large Cemetery // Creative Nonfiction
“I know the way: walk straight back into the oldest part of the cemetery until you reach a low stone wall. Sit on it and look in front of you to see where my family is buried… Stones with writing, stones with writing effaced, stones with unfamiliar names, stones with names of people I knew and loved… Every time I visit, it seems that nothing has changed. But that’s not true. My aunt lies there now, joining her husband, who died before I was born. Once or twice, I have seen other people. I think. In my memory, they gradually fade into the trees, into the stones, into their own families.”
Sometimes I Don’t Know What My Autistic Nephew Means // Poetry
“but I tell him / both of his great grandfathers’ eyes, / two different storms, / one over the river, the other over all / these rugged hills.”
Footsteps // Poetry
“The Big Bang was quiet / as an empty house. / Just a lightbulb coming on / in a darkened room… A letter in the mailbox. / A black cat in the window.”
Theo, Stuck in Twine // Creative Nonfiction
“We often wonder about how our alpacas’ inner lives. They are intelligent and curious, often coming to meet us at the fence when we go out to the pasture, but they are more invested in their herd than in us. Our dinner table looks out into their enclosure, and sometimes we catch them watching us, but we are an afterthought, a curiosity—the creatures who bring them hay. Do they trust us? Do they like us? The alpacas are not our friends. We farm them, but they really belong to each other.”
Blackberries // Creative Nonfiction
“On returning as an adult, it’s clear one could easily just stride across this trickle of dirty water, but at the time it seemed like our only hope was to skitter across the loose collections of two-by-fours and planking built by some mysterious grownups, probably from an ancient civilization. Beyond the creek lay Frankenstein’s Graveyard, an outcropping of gray, flaking shale. The somber pile of slick, gray stone for some reason reminded us of the monster’s last resting place.”
Uncultivated // Poetry
“We ran to steal pears / impossibly sweet… We took what we loved inside us / and kept it through the year. / When we passed each other / in a hallway or mall, / we’d give a brief, affirming nod.”
Esphyr Slobodkina // Fiction
“The peddler feels for his caps, but they are not there. ‘All he felt was his own checked cap.’ We both look around us, as the peddler looks around. Then we look up at my bookshelf, the one that holds half autism books and half my all-time favorite books… The books that got me through school and college and Oren’s diagnosis, and then his father leaving after we moved to Israel. We’re still there, we’re still close to Oren’s dad’s family, only they’re not my family anymore. The books are my family.”
Apple Trees in Etowah // Poetry
“I want to walk among them… that scrap of song, the one that echoes… But hidden / some strayed piece of my heart / in the hall of my mouth, I taste the harvest.”
Without The Sound Of Fear // Poetry
“It is all quiet now -- / the outside world, the inside too. / The wind has pushed itself down / close to the foundation of the house… we realize, we never listened to it, / though its always there, / always has been -- under everything.”
No Eye // Poetry
“Because no eye is… on the sparrow / the doors all swing / without ever ceasing… the getting through / how it brands us / in our frailty we are / not without fault… yet there still is an exhalation”
The Dead Walk // Poetry
“My dead are planted / elsewhere, my parents / in a hard clay country / cemetery in southern / Alabama, my husband / scattered along the scruffy / armpit of the Florida shore / where we were married.”
Marbles // Poetry
“stood / on my toes… until / I saw it, one single marble, light blue and wispy / like the ocean on a perfect summer morning / right where it meets the horizon, like the sweetest / dream you’ve ever had, only a few moments / before waking / when all you’ve ever wished for seems so close”
Between Landslides // Poetry
“You seem to know how this hill stood / before the gardens, the chimneys, the children / in swings and afternoon laughter… You foretell a scattering of pots / and urns / when this house is no longer / the slow decent into wetland and swamp, / the river then a sea.”
Homecouver // Creative Nonfiction
“I stare at the shades of gray as if to see through the clouds for the lives further east: the one I’ve actually lived, all the possible ones should I have stayed. That middle-school self is moving not by the better life he aspired to hold tight—not better in hindsight—but by his posture, standing and longing.”
A Dream About My Mother // Poetry
“Some mothers are furious volcanoes— you never know when they will erupt. / Some mothers are distant ice-storms; there’s no mother there at all. / There are children playing in the road. / Balls, jump ropes, a plastic bat. / Some mothers make very small lives and then live them… I have had each of these mothers, sometimes. / Other times, none.”
Social // Fiction
CW: mentions of hazing, substance abuse, sexual assault
Author note: While this is a work of fiction, the content depicts actions and outcomes that sadly have occurred on college campuses for decades.
“Many of them freshly held the memory of their own move-in day, just weeks earlier, when the brothers of Pi Gamma would chant at departing parents from the fraternity house porch, ‘Don’t Leave Your Daughter! Don’t Leave Your Daughter!’… He was alone. What could he piece together? Very little at first… If he were to see her on campus, he’d have to decide whether to smile, wave, or just avoid her altogether… [Dad’s] talking about his college days; he’s talking about being reckless. He’s asking questions that I can’t answer and wouldn’t want to answer to him, even if I did know. I feel broken.”
(Genesis 8:11) // Poetry
“when he lifts his face / to ask if he can have / a brother or a sister… on my afternoon walk / a robin lay dead on the path… Child, my mouth is full of olive / leaves, yet I have no / place to land.”
The Spider Plant // Fiction
“Alex said he didn’t care if I slept in that office, so long as I could find myself again … ‘Give it some time,’ he said…. Clumps of dirt raced each other toward the drain and disappeared. Droplets of water glistened on the plant’s leaves. When I found my breath, I swore the leaves were green again.”
The Far Hope // Poetry
“It’s why I keep watering the wilting mums / every morning. Finding books / I’m not looking for… Maybe the recipe / is less screen time and more / interesting animal facts. Mirror neurons. / Staying focused with an infant crying / in my hands. Becoming the old man / who can identify trains by whistle signals.”
In Time, Everything Rises // Poetry
“Each banana a finger / from a flower, each row of fingers a hand sliced / into bunches and blue bagged for transport …Like that downed plant / which in time rises to bloom again, today I dress, drive / to the store to buy the vanilla I need.”
Smoked Fish on a Saturday // Fiction
“In my mind, I don’t rush out the door. I see myself accepting the menu from the scowling waiter, entering at a measured pace, taking in my surroundings. I am seated and I order the fish platter, though I know it’s far more than I can possibly eat by myself… In my mind, I am transported, awash in memory and nostalgia. In my mind, it is precisely as I want it to be.”
Spring Tree Picking // Poetry
“In June, the grandsons arrive, fresh / from another school year, clamoring / for their grandfather’s attention… In buoyant mood, he teases the boys, / says they must be cautious, make sure / the tree doesn’t lift upward with Mary Poppins / hanging from its trunk.”
Gaze // Poetry
“The turmeric poppy / rolls up at night like a scroll, / and unrolls at dawn / for the bees to read… the roster of historic invaders… muse that they were all long gone, / while we, he’d say, / (may he rest in peace) / we are all still here.”
Poem for Willy Silber // Poetry
“Willy Silber, nice, quiet boy / whose parents owned a bakery, / or they lived above a bakery-- / there was some connection / with a bakery, the smell of bread / in the oven, she said.”
Memories // Poetry
“It’s not only the buildings that were / destroyed in Kyiv, but the dreams / that made them, an apartment… / family photos on the ground, / so many that she gathered them up / because she wanted to meet the people / in them and share their stories.”
Futures Come And Go // Poetry
“Under unfamiliar stars, / beneath the hours’ red contempt, / at the death of the mile — / how much longer”
Leaving the Boxes // Poetry
“The boxes, they mocked me, / there in their corner, gathering / their dust, judgmental as a parlor aunt… Let the dumped yellowing scraps / drift where they may. For today… an air-kissed, downy, windborne white pinion—”
The Long Goodbye: An Affair of the Heart // Creative Nonfiction
“I realized I could choose to be proud of her. My mother was loving, sweet, and friendly and, each time she embarked on her nursing monologue, I saw her audience move from confusion to realization to kindness, listening and smiling until I gently pried her away. Then we’d sit at our table, I’d explain the menu, and she’d flirt with the waiters. My mother’s true nature had emerged. Unplugged from the past, it was beautiful.”
Until Then, the Garden // Fiction
“People just do not realize what it is like to care for a sweet someone, who is almost always living far away in the past… in Emily's mind, she is walking to work, or taking the kids to school, or going shopping. She often takes things from other people’s rooms because she is in a place where that magazine belongs to her, or she was borrowing that tape dispenser from someone’s office to take it back to her own.”