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Mary Unger, Empty

Mary waits at the foot of the stairs. She means to go up the stairs and back to bed but feels too exhausted to make the climb. 

Villanelle

Sugar

We’re in the check-out line and I’m putting the groceries on the counter. This is the hardest part of shopping with a two-year-old.

Selected Poems

Sunbeams

Conclusions arrived at through reasoning have very little or no influence in altering the course of our lives.

Carlos Castaneda
The Fire from Within

A Night Swim

Phillip Fanno was playing with his food. He gave his pork chop a mashed potato beard and moustache, a julienned-carrot nose and mouth, and, not finding suitable eyes on his plate, cast about the table for them.

A Dictionary Of Childhood

Because I had found it hard to attend to anything less interesting than my thoughts, I was difficult to teach.

William Butler Yeats,
Reveries over Childhood and Youth (1916)

Mama’s Story

I’ve warned Mama not to tell her story today. Mama has a visitor, a Mrs. Thompson from her Sunday School class. First Baptist believes in staying in touch.

A Letter Never Written

Adopting, reconnecting with an old friend, being AWOL in peacetime

I Stand Here Ironing

We were poor and could not afford for her the soil of easy growth. I was a young mother, I was a distracted mother. There were the other children pushing up, demanding.