At some point, walking along the snow-flocked train tracks in the winter evening’s half-light, I became aware. By this I mean: All that I was was now. I had no past to dwell within, chiding myself, steeped in regrets. I had no future lingering in the wings like a Dickens villain, ready to set me…
Category: Creative
The Grandfather Tree
I never thought I would give you permission to cut down that giant oak tree in the back of the property, the one that had led my grandfather to buy this land in the first place. It had been tall even when he’d seen it as a young man only a year into his first…
the daze of winter
i saw the daze of winter fading from the eyes of the downtrodden as a fire had been kindled afresh in the dying embers of august’s barbecue a bare-footed retinue flexed their toes in the muddy spring stretched their arms yawned out their souls and dug in again backs laden with the vexing hope of…
In the mirror
I saw my face in the mirror, in passing, and it was someone else. I didn’t recognize the eyes, or the hair, or the point of the nose. But that wasn’t it, because I never do. There was something different. A light, a candle flame, that used to flicker. It was gone. I stopped to…
Found Haiku
“It’s dinnertime, so I’m about to eat dinner. Butter is butter!” — jeh, age 3
Haiku
The nights are longer It’s harder to hold the sun Take heart: Two more weeks — ptkh 120912
An Experiment in Pronouns
Tee hated skim. Crystal knew that with all of ter heart: Tee hated Marcus, body and soul. The way that skee looked at tim, with that glib smirk, that cologne that skee wore in a cloud of sweet seduction, that swagger in sker step as skee stood by the coffee maker. And oh, how tee…
Haiku
December the ninth. A climate change souvenir: Rain, in Michigan — ptkh 120912
The Wanderer: The apple
The wanderer stopped at the side of the road, stooped down, and considered an apple that had settled itself into the muddy sluiceway. It did not appear to have come there naturally. There were apple trees in the distance, to be sure: Ghostly fingers reaching up into the late November sky, backed by a gray…
The abandoned dacha
That morning, I met with Oleg in the house in the valley at the bottom of the steep road that nobody with any sense would ever try to drive up, the one carved straight up the side of the hill because people in that part of the world had apparently never heard of switchbacks. I…