Sundays when I was a small boy, my paternal grandmother watched the faith healer Oral Roberts on our Philco television. She was almost eighty years old at the time and nearly blind with cataracts. I watched with her because I was fascinated with television. An only child, I learned to entertain myself. I loved the …
Nights those Jesus bugs skimmed creek’s surfacemy bare feet glimmering like risen again I’d snuckpast date palms & horse corrals graveyardtrilling beyond highway & the boys & their shiningbodies I’d brought my own carried itwith me only newer stickysummer air & white flies circling streetlampswhat bliss was mine those moments beforeglistening rocks before shivering water …
Groping for underwear in my top drawer my fingers brush the velvet bag I shoved far in the back, not knowing where to store spent casings from the guns that fired above my mother’s casket. That was a month ago. Today—deep breath—I spill them in my hand, these hollow fossils from that blast of woe …
The First of Them The first of the études always reminds her of a day when she was thirteen, though there’s no reason to remember this one day over so many others like it, while things were still good and summer meant beautiful blue skies with her parents lazing on chaise longues near the docks, …
Susan B. Anthony had hair as black as soot, skin as white as snow. Susan B. Anthony had a red, red cape that she loved to pieces and refashioned into a banner. Wicked stepmothers tried and failed to force her to go to the ball, marry sensibly, to be the stepmother of the dreaming daughters …