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Compassion
Selected Poems
— from “A Pittsburgh Poem” | Imagine a man in a hat on a street early one morning in autumn. / This is my grandfather on his way to work at the brokerage firm. / He is a treasurer. He takes the bus down from the southern hills. / It is October 28, 1929.
February 2010Taking A Life
It was a brilliantly sunny October day, and I was driving on Route 100 alongside Vermont’s White River when the driver of the logging truck in front of me slammed on the brakes. I stopped just in time to avoid a collision and saw a great animal floundering in the middle of the road up ahead. Someone had hit a white-tailed deer, a doe.
September 2009
The Aftermath Lounge
Catch stepped out of his trailer and saw the girl alone on the beach across the highway. She was wading ankle deep in the gulf, wearing a light brown bikini the color of her skin. Catch hadn’t seen anyone on the beach in a long time, not since the hurricane, the one most people in town couldn’t stand to call by name anymore.
December 2008
Future Zarahs
The Peace Corps doesn’t send volunteers to the countries where we work, those anarchic Fourth World places where the globalization beast barely pauses to wipe its lips — places like Sierra Leone in 2004.
September 2008
Sunbeams
January 2008After twelve years of therapy my psychiatrist said something that brought tears to my eyes: “No hablo inglés.”
My Stepsister’s Music
When my mother’s third husband took me / thirty years ago to see his daughter / from his first marriage / smash the cymbals / with the high-school marching band, / he told me to be nice afterward because / she was “slow”
January 2007Field Notes
When they set out to document the lives of Mexican migrant workers in Hartville, author David Hassler and photographer Gary Harwood expected to find examples of injustice, deprivation, and misery. Instead they found a functioning seasonal community, rich in culture, to which entire families return each year. The work is hard and dirty, and the workers struggle to support themselves and their dependents.
November 2006
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