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Carpe Diem Haiku and Tanka
young girls in pink tutus—it’s hard to believe we’re all dying * anti-aging conference? we argue and research how to stay young, meanwhile, on our shelves drums and flutes gather dust
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All Around Us Darkness
In the middle of the night mom finds me still awake and makes us tea. We stand in her bright kitchen and cradle our steaming cups. How the hands like something to do, even at this quiet hour. We talk...
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As Far As My Life Has Gotten Me
Love says, ‘I am everything.’ Wisdom says, ‘I am nothing.’ Between these two my life flows. –Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj It is enough today to walk. The road is gravel. To the left, dry fields. To the...
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Grace
Bless the softness of the body, and bless how I have struggled so long against being soft. I have tried to be hard, to be firm, to be fit, to be thin, I have tried to disappear. And after the hiking,...
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Unutterable
She slumps at the table. It is shiny, and like everything else here, it looks new, everything else except the bodies, gnarled and sloppy, hunched in and frail. I cry in an instant, when, from across...
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Why the Women Cry
Why the Women Cry Lara and I sit side by side in her rocking chairs. Like old women. We are old women. Or at least much older than when we first had sleepovers at her house in seventh grade. She would...
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Joseph, I Know It Is Meant to Be a Comfort, But I’m Tired of Stumbling
Where you stumble, there your treasure lies. —Joseph Campbell Oh body, this is your real destination, the fall. The lurch. The blunder. The stagger. The hobble. The trip. Though I’ve practiced at grace...
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Concourse B
She walks so easily down the concourse, the young woman in the short dress and sandals, her purse slung across her slender shoulder. She’s not encumbered by much that I can see— no children pulling on...
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At the Edge of July
Summer, what could you say to this body, this body nearing its autumn? What could your flowers teach this heart about blooming despite heat, despite drought? What could your shortening days tell...
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In a Low-Angled Light
Already shriveled, these marigolds that line the fence. Something soothing about the way the flowers keep their color, though the leaves are brown and dried. From a distance, they are vibrant....
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When I Get Up to Leave My Daughter at Bedtime
Don’t stop, she says, and grabs my hand and pulls it again to her back. She rakes it across her skin and urges the nails deeper in to scratch some invisible itch that she can’t reach herself....
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Head Full of Dreams
Skimming around the radio dial I catch John Cougar Mellencamp growling about R O C K in the USA, and I sing along out of habit, not necessarily out of joy, the words and the rhythm still...
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A Shade of the Truth
How soon the flowers wilt. Wasn’t it just yesterday you planted them, just an hour ago there were mounds of bloom shining in the rain? You want to believe there’s a flower that never stops...
View ArticleOne Over the Loudspeaker
and suddenly I’m singing in the cereal aisle, unable to turn the music up and dancing anyway— the words spin me like old friends, My older self looks back at me and says, that’s right, move it...
View ArticleOne in the Eye of the Beholder
reading the book again— the dogeared pages the same, the story in them, wholly changed
View ArticleHarriette Buys a Bikini
After all, she is going on a cruise and booked in the Presidential Suite. Let her daughter laugh. What does it matter she’s over seventy? Harriet fingers the thin strips of nylon, lets them fall...
View ArticleAnd So It Has Come to This
for Betty Rocker I roll out the yoga mat in the living room and find the You Tube channel on which the twenty-something girl with an armful of tattoos and a perky smile tells me in her perky voice all...
View ArticleMidsummer
And after the hail and the midsummer frost, the garden remembers how to summer, how to green, how to leaf and root and bloom, and everything is so alive, even this gardener who somehow does not...
View ArticleTwo Chairs
I pull out two chairs. One for me. One for the girl who didn’t want to become a woman. The girl who, at night, would use tweezers to pull out any hairs that tried to grow where her skin had always...
View ArticleAutumn Beside the River
The rocks that were underwater two months ago are dry now, and a woman can sit on them beneath the bridge and escape the September sun. But she can’t escape herself. There was a time she really...
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