Browse Topics

Tea For Two

Since Karen left me, my evenings are quiet and predictable. No longer does she greet me the moment I open the front door with her wiry silence, unnerving as eye contact with a tiger pacing its cage.

Sunbeams

You see I thought love got easier over the years so it didn’t hurt so bad when it hurt, or feel so good when it felt good. I thought it smoothed out and old people hardly noticed it. I thought it curled up and died, I guess. Now I saw it rear up like a whip and lash.

Louise Erdrich

Broken Water Glass

By Fire And Water

An Interview With Michael Meade

All this violence is a fire screaming for the water of human attention. I don’t think we’re going to be able to keep going unless we deal with it. To me the two big events of the last two years are the fires in L.A. and the flooding of the Mississippi River. I think they are strangely related.

Your Own People

I look at her, the words to hit and cut and run burning in my throat. She knows I could use them, too. It’s from her I got this mouth that can soothe and slice in alternate breaths.

The Kitchen

An artist, a vanilla bean thief, a battered wife

Nothing Personal

I asked the post office clerk why she was smiling. She said she’d just gotten off the phone with a woman who insisted her mail wasn’t being delivered. I asked what was funny about that. The clerk rolled her eyes. She said the caller was upset because all she received were bills, never personal letters.

A Perfect Right To Love

How did this happen? How did my desire for a baby escalate during the past few years from a sweet little notion that fluttered through my mind now and then into a full-scale, unrelenting obsession? At what point did I lose all sense of proportion and patience?

Hatching Denise

At thirty-one, I steadily decay. Breasts succumb to gravity and sag. My eyes weaken. My senses falter. Well-meaning friends have offered referrals for plastic surgeons, opticians, and psychoanalysts, hinting at the necessity to fight the breakdown of body, the breakup of mind.

Selected Poems