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Family and Relationships
Without the Gate
Usually he has a morning episode, then he’s placid most of the day, chatty, gently losing his mind in starts and stops. But after dinner the maximum horror falls on him. He stiffens, his face wracked. He’s at the threshold; he can almost remember the “thing.”
January 2025
Cows in the Parking Lot of the Emergency Dentist
The day I waded out of the lake with a stand-up / paddleboard and a split tooth was four days after I knew / I would leave you and eight days before I told you / I knew.
January 2025Walking Out
A peach-pickers’ strike, a crisis of faith, a paralyzing accident
January 2025
Time in the Shape of Hills
My bones wake me up at night. It was my hips at first, then my femurs screaming. Now my ankles. But my doctor won’t listen. It started last year when my son and I walked the Camino de Santiago, the ancient pilgrimage route that runs through Spain. I’m sure that’s why my bones hurt—from all the walking.
January 2025
Lost and Found
I want to be a good man, a good son, but that’s hard to pull off when it’s 100 degrees and feels like 115 because of the 90 percent humidity—current conditions in southeast Georgia. I’ve come home to visit my eighty-two-year-old mother and assuage some of my guilt for not being here fifty weeks out of the year.
January 2025
Right Guard
As he aged, my father dwindled, / not in stature—though he grew smaller, / as elders must—but rather in estate. / He never required much, // insisted on giving things away. / What am I going to do with all this?
December 2024My Ghost Fleet
I have spent hours in attics, the kind reached by pulling a rope in the ceiling and ascending to a stagnant room. It was in attics that I found love letters tied with ribbons, and wedding dresses in paper boxes the size of coffins, and sepia photographs of uncles in uniform and children who’d died of scarlet fever. I sifted through images of wraparound porches and white chickens, three-legged dogs and men with cigars. I think there is a reason why the past collects in attics: heavily, above us.
December 2024
Making Luxury Out of Flat Soda
I learned to breathe in my grandmother’s kitchen / despite life sitting on my chest. / Scent of cast-iron skillet seasoned by sunrises / and ancestors’ touch. Gospels of sizzling grease / and bubbling greens my uncle called hallelujah and amen.
December 2024
Luxuries
A foreign sports car, a Hawaiian vacation, a glass of water on a hot day
December 2024
A Thousand Words
A Thousand Words features photography so rich with narrative that it tells a story all on its own.
December 2024
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