A Tidings of Magpies

Much happiness and joy to you and yours...polar bears optional.

by Alicia Suskin Ostriker To be blessed said the old woman is to live and work so hard God's love washes right through you like milk through a cow To be blessed said the dark red tulip is to knock their eyes out with the slug of lust implied by your up-ended skirt To be blessed said the dog is to have a pinch of God inside you and all the other dogs can smell it please note: artwork by Scott Burdick, Moravian Barn

by Dale Ritterbusch There is this tea I have sometimes, Pan Long Ying Hao, so tightly curled it looks like tiny roots gnarled, a greenish-gray. When it steeps, it opens the way you woke this morning, stretching, your hands behind your head, back arched, toes pointing, a smile steeped in ceremony, a celebration, the reaching of your arms. please note: artwork by Andrés Fernández Cordón.

by Joyce Sutphen I know how the cow's head turns to gaze at the child in the hay aisle; I know the way the straw shines under the one bare light in the barn. How a chicken pecks gravel into silt and how the warm egg rests beneath the feathers—I know that too, and what to say, watching the rain slide in silver chains over the machine shed's roof. I know how one pail of water calls to another and how it sloshes and spills when I walk from the milk-house to the barn. I know how the barn fills and then empties, how I scatter lime on the walk, how I sweep it up. In the silo, I know the rung under my foot; on the tractor, I know the clutch and the throttle; I slip through the fence and into the woods, where I know everything: trunk by branch by leaf into sky. please note: photo by Ron and Kay Weber

by E. E. Cummings little tree little silent Christmas tree you are so little you are more like a flower who found you in the green forest and were you very sorry to come away? see i will comfort you because you smell so sweetly i will kiss your cool bark and hug you safe and tight just as your mother would, only don't be afraid look the spangles that sleep all the year in a dark box dreaming of being taken out and allowed to shine, the balls the chains red and gold the fluffy threads, put up your little arms and i'll give them all to you to hold every finger shall have its ring and there won't be a single place dark or unhappy then when you're quite dressed you'll stand in the window for everyone to see and how they'll stare! oh but you'll be very proud and my little sister and i will take hands and looking up at our beautiful tree we'll dance and sing "Noel Noel"

by Anna George Meek Cream of Tartar, commonly used to lift meringue and angel food cake, is actually made from crystallized fine wine. After they stopped singing for him, the carolers became transparent in the dark, and he stepped into their emptiness to say he lost his wife last week, please sing again. Their voices filled with gold. Last week, his fedora nodded hello to me on the sidewalk, and the fragile breath of kindness that passed between us made something sweet of a morning that had frightened me for no earthly reason. Surely, you know this by another name: the mysteries we intake, exhale, could be sitting on our shelves, left on the bus seat beside us. Don't wash your hands. You fingered them at the supermarket, gave them to the cashier; intoxicated tonight, she'll sing in the streets. Think of the old man. Who knew he kept the secret of levitation, transference, and lightness filling a winter night? — an effortless, crystalline powder That could almost seem transfi...

After diligent research by way of a pocket Hallmark calendar it's certain that 18 years' wedded bliss is the "Rock, Paper, Scissors" anniversary, next may be HeyDay at Ben & Jerry's, then comes the 20 year "Platinum" extravaganza. Good times...

by George Bilgere I check the locks on the front door and the side door, make sure the windows are closed and the heat dialed down. I switch off the computer, turn off the living room lights. I let in the cats. Reverently, I unplug the Christmas tree, leaving Christ and the little animals in the dark. The last thing I do is step out to the back yard for a quick look at the Milky Way. The stars are halogen-blue. The constellations, whose names I have long since forgotten, look down anonymously, and the whole galaxy is cartwheeling in silence through the night. Everything seems to be ok.

by Gregory Djanikian Tarrytown, N.Y. Bing Crosby was singing "White Christmas" on the radio, we were staying at my aunt's house waiting for papers, my father was looking for a job. We had trimmed the tree the night before, sap had run on my fingers and for the first time I was smelling pine wherever I went. Anais, my cousin, was upstairs in her room listening to Danny and the Juniors. Haigo was playing Monopoly with Lucy, his sister, Buzzy, the boy next door, had eyes for her and there was a rattle of dice, a shuffling of Boardwalk, Park Place, Marvin Gardens. There were red bows on the Christmas tree. It had snowed all night. My boot buckles were clinking like small bells as I thumped to the door and out onto the grey planks of the porch dusted with snow. The world was immaculate, new, even the trees had changed color, ...

Has anyone run across this blog before?? I can't remember where I first read about it, but now I think it may have been on World News Tonight. Okay, okay. So, I have no short term memory anymore. Very over-rated anyway. This blog, however, is very sweet, and oddly enough most of the photos don't look that ancient to me...:>) It all really does go by quickly, doesn't it? http://myparentswereawesome.tumblr.com/

by Galway Kinnell I open my eyes to see how the night is progressing. The clock glows green, the light of the last-quarter moon shines up off the snow into our bedroom. Her portion of our oceanic duvet lies completely flat. The words of the shepherd in Tristan, "Waste and empty, the sea," come back to me. Where can she be? Then in the furrow where the duvet overlaps her pillow, a small hank of brown hair shows itself, her marker that she's here, asleep, somewhere down in the dark underneath. Now she rotates herself a quarter turn, from strewn all unfolded on her back to bunched in a Z on her side, with her back to me. I squirm nearer, careful not to break into the immensity of her sleep, and lie there absorbing the astounding quantity of heat a slender body ovens up around itself. Her slow, purring, sometimes snorish, perfectly intelligible sleeping sounds abruptly stop. A leg darts back and hooks my ankle with its foot and draws me closer. Immediately her sleeping sounds...

Nights Our House Comes to Life by Matthew Brennan Some nights in midwinter when the creek clogs With ice and the spines of fir trees stiffen Under a blank, frozen sky, On these nights our house comes to life. It happens when you're half asleep: A sudden crack, a fractured dream, you bolting Upright – but all you can hear is the clock Your great-grandfather found in 1860 And smuggled here from Dublin for his future bride, A being as unknown to him then as she is now To you, a being as distant as the strangers Who built this house, and died in this room Some cold, still night, like tonight, When all that was heard were the rhythmic clicks Of a pendulum, and something, barely audible, Moving on the dark landing of the attic stairs.

by Jim Harrison At dawn Warren is on my bed, a ragged lump of fur listening to the birds as if deciding whether or not to catch one. He has an old man's mimsy delusion. A rabbit runs across the yard and he walks after it thinking he might close the widening distance just as when I followed a lovely woman on boulevard Montparnasse but couldn't equal her rapid pace, the click-click of her shoes moving into the distance, turning the final corner, but when I turned the corner she had disappeared and I looked up into the trees thinking she might have climbed one. When I was young a country girl would climb a tree and throw apples down at my upturned face. Warren and I are both searchers. He's looking for his dead sister Shirley, and I'm wondering about my brother John who left the earth on this voyage all living creatures take. Both cat and man are bathed in pleasant insignificance, their eyes fixed on birds and stars. please note: photo by Jack Norton

by Mary Oliver Chunky and noisy, but with stars in their black feathers, they spring from the telephone wire and instantly they are acrobats in the freezing wind. And now, in the theater of air, they swing over buildings, dipping and rising; they float like one stippled star that opens, becomes for a moment fragmented, then closes again; and you watch and you try but you simply can't imagine how they do it with no articulated instruction, no pause, only the silent confirmation that they are this notable thing, this wheel of many parts, that can rise and spin over and over again, full of gorgeous life. Ah, world, what lessons you prepare for us, even in the leafless winter, even in the ashy city. I am thinking now of grief, and of getting past it; I feel my boots trying to leave the ground, I feel my heart pumping hard, I want to think again of dangerous and noble things. I want to be light and frolicsome. I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing, as though I had wing...

by Anne Porter We're still in Babylon but We do not weep Why should we weep? We have forgotten How to weep We've sold our harps And bought ourselves machines That do our singing for us And who remembers now The songs we sang in Zion? We have got used to exile We hardly notice Our captivity For some of us There are such comforts here Such luxuries Even a guard To keep the beggars From annoying us Jerusalem We have forgotten you.

Three years ago, on December 3, a friend of mine died. It's described in his obituary as "died suddenly," but truth be told, he'd been dying a little everyday since his partner, Tom, left this earth. I was working the afternoon I got the call about Ken; one of the nurses upstairs had heard the bad news and in a hospital bad news spreads quickly. Another nurse covered the rest of my shift, I ran home and changed clothes for the funeral. The church was decorated for Christmas and lit with candles. Every pew was taken with family, friends, co-workers, ex-patients. The music was amazing, including a bagpiper whose sounds filled the space to the rafters. The minister broke down twice crying during the homily. What I remember, though, everytime I think of Ken, or think I see him at the hospital, or on a neighborhood street, or at the local IGA, is the instruction the minister gave us. Ken's death came at the start of Advent, and while we were trying to wrap our brains a...

by Corey Mesler for David Markson "One beginning and one ending for a book was a thing I did not agree with." Flann O'Brien from At Swim-Two-Birds God bless the experimental writers. The ones whose work is a little difficult, built of tinkertoys and dada, or portmanteau and Reich. God help them as they type away, knowing their readers are few, only those who love to toil over an intricate boil of language, who think books are secret codes. These writers will never see their names in Publisher's Weekly. They will never be on the talk shows. Yet, every day they disappear into their rooms atop their mother's houses, or their guest houses behind some lawyer's estate. Every day they tack improbable word onto im- probable word, out of love, children, out of a desire to emend the world.

by Freya Manfred What matters most? It's a foolish question because I'm hanging on, just like you. No, I'm past hanging on. It's after midnight and I'm falling toward four a.m., the best time for ghosts, terror, and lost hopes. No one says anything of significance to me. I don't care if the President's a two year old, and the Vice President's four. I don't care if you're cashing in your stocks or building homes for the homeless. I was a caring person. I would make soup and grow you many flowers. I would enter your world, my hands open to catch your tears, my lips on your lips in case we both went deaf and blind. But I don't care about your birthday, or Christmas, or lover's lane, or even you, not as much as I pretend. Ah, I was about to say, "I don't care about the stars" -- but I had to stop my pen. Sometimes, out in the silent black Wisconsin countryside I glance up and see everything that's not on earth, glowing, puls...

by Anne Porter Wild geese are flocking and calling in pure golden air, Glory like that which painters long ago Spread as a background for some little hermit Beside his cave, giving his cloak away, Or for some martyr stretching out On her expected rack. A few black cedars grow nearby And there's a donkey grazing. Small craftsmen, steeped in anonymity like bees, Gilded their wooden panels, leaving fame to chance, Like the maker of this wing-flooded golden sky, Who forgives all our ignorance Both of his nature and of his very name, Freely accepting our one heedless glance.

by John Estes Perhaps, after all, it is merely a desire to use the word thanatopsical — but if you can wash or handle artifacts like this blue tea mug, carried from Crete as a gift from a friend, or this nacreous orange bowl, a honeymoon souvenir bought in a now-defunct artists' shop in Colorado, or this antique Chinese mudman carrying his sponges and fish from a day at the pier, without a pathological fixation on the day you will stumble and drop it, or smack it against the sink divider or brush it with a hand reaching for the letter opener, you are junzi : a superior person, as Confucius had it. You probably make love to your spouse without imagining betrayal and pay taxes without complaint because you think nothing in truth belongs to you. They invented the earth for people like you, and then salted it. please note: photo by jon.noj

The Surgeon by Alicia Suskin Ostriker I was still a kid interning at State he reminisces late in the meal— It was a young red-headed woman looked like my sister when the lines went flat I fell apart shook like a car with a broken axle Went to the head surgeon a fatherly man Boy, he said, you got to fill a graveyard before you know this business and you just did row one, plot one.

by Jim Harrison Late November (full moon last night), a cold Patagonia moon, the misty air tinkled slightly, a rank-smelling bull in the creek bottom seemed to be crying. Coyotes yelped up the canyon where they took a trip-wire photo of a jaguar last spring. I hope he's sleeping or eating a delicious deer. Our two little girl dogs are peeing in the midnight yard, nervous about the bull. They can't imagine a jaguar.

...happy, happy.

for wriggling my way into the attic to find the middle leaf for the dining room table and bring down the games for Thanksgiving. Our feast will be on Tuesday since Hubby and I are both working the holiday. The grrrrls will be home making the rounds with the grandmothers. Stop back for a comparative study of stuffings and cranberry sauces. I started cooking this afternoon. Sorry to say my dressing isn't up to its usual snuff. Used some fancy-schmancy sausage instead of the tried and true Jimmy Dean Bulk Pork Sausage. Let that be a lesson to anyone getting a little cocky and wanting to be innovative. Resist the urge. Save it for the leftovers. Very thankful for my new BFF, Hulu.com. Got to catch up on past episodes of The Good Wife . Made all the chopping go quite pleasantly, although now that I think about it, perhaps the problem with my dressing. Damn that vixen, Julianna. I have many things to be thankful for this year, the friendships and camaraderie I've found here among the...

XI. by Wendell Berry Though he was ill and in pain, in disobedience to the instruction he would have received if he had asked, the old man got up from his bed, dressed, and went to the barn. The bare branches of winter had emerged through the last leaf-colors of fall, the loveliest of all, browns and yellows delicate and nameless in the gray light and the sifting rain. He put feed in the troughs for eighteen ewe lambs, sent the dog for them, and she brought them. They came eager to their feed, and he who felt their hunger was by their feeding eased. From no place in the time of present places, within no boundary nameable in human thought, they had gathered once again, the shepherd, his sheep, and his dog with all the known and the unknown round about to the heavens' limit. Was this his stubbornness or bravado? No. Only an ordinary act of profoundest intimacy in a day that might have been better. Still the world persisted in its beauty, he in his gratitude, and for this he had most ...

by Gregory Djanikian You could think of sunlight Glancing off the minarets, You could think of guavas and figs And the whole marketplace filled With the sumptuous din of haggling, But you could not think of Alexandria Without the sea, or the sea, Turquoise and shimmering, without The white city rising before it. Even on the back streets You could feel it on your skin, You could smell it in the aroma Of dark coffee, spiced meat. You looked at the sea and you heard The wail of an Arab woman singing or praying. If, as I can now, you could point To the North Atlantic, swollen And dark as it often is, you might say, "Here lies Wrath," or "Truly God is great." You could season a Puritan soul by it. But you could fall into the Mediterranean As though you were falling into a blue dream, Gauzy, half unreal for its loveliness. It was deceptively calm and luxurious. At Stanley Bay, you could float On your back and watch the evening sun Color the city a faint rose. You could dr...

by Howard Nemerov Prig offered Pig the first chance at dessert, So Pig reached out and speared the bigger part. "Now that," cried Prig, "is extremely rude of you!" Pig, with his mouth full, said, "Wha, wha' wou' 'ou do?" "I would have taken the littler bit," said Prig. "Stop kvetching, then it's what you've got," said Pig. So virtue is its own reward, you see. And that is all it's ever going to be.

Grapefruit by Ted McMahon My grandfather got up early to section grapefruit. I know because I got up quietly to watch. He was tall. His hairless shins stuck out below his bathrobe, down to leather slippers. The house was quiet, sun just up, ticking of the grandfather clock tall in the corner. The grapefruit were always sectioned just so, nestled in clear nubbled bowls used for nothing else, with half a maraschino centered bleeding slowly into soft pale triangles of fruit. It was special grapefruit, Indian River, not to be had back home. Doves cooed outside and the last night-breeze rustled the palms against the eaves. He turned to see me, pale light flashing off his glasses and smiled. I remember as I work my knife along the membrane separating sections. It's dawn. The doves and palms are far away. I don't use cherries anymore. The clock is digital and no one is watching. Please note:Photo courtesy PDPhoto.org

Driving at Night by Sheila Packa Up north, the dashboard lights of the family car gleam in memory, the radio plays to itself as I drive my father plied the highways while my mother talked, she tried to hide that low lilt, that Finnish brogue, in the back seat, my sisters and I our eyes always tied to the Big Dipper I watch it still on summer evenings, as the fireflies stream above the ditches and moths smack into the windshield and the wildlife's red eyes bore out from the dark forests we flew by, then scattered like the last bit of star light years before. It's like a different country, the past we made wishes on unnamed falling stars that I've forgotten, that maybe were granted because I wished for love.

after Rilke's Herbsttag by Jeredith Merrin Time, it is time. Summer has been long-stretched-out, full. Go ahead, Fall: shrink down the days and sugar the grapes for late-harvest wine. Anyone still unknown to herself will stay, probably, that way. Anyone unlinked by love will be love- left-out now—waking, mind-pacing up and down up and down, restless as leaf-bits and papers in the street. I believe this will be the last poem and writing I post in a while. Perhaps forever. Who knows. With the rest of the stuff in my life that needs to get done, writing and blogging are becoming yet another task to complete, and not a respite. I have so enjoyed meeting all of you and hearing your voices in the comments, and you may still see me lurking around some rainy Sunday afternoons. Best of life to you all and wishes for all of its blessings to you and yours. I'll be looking for you further on down the road.

by John Lindgren Endings are always more difficult than beginnings. Don't ask me why I remember lying alone in the grass at dusk, gored by the tiny horns of snails, filaments of spider-silk like threads of starlight across my eyes. I was listening to the orange and blue leaves explain my countless lives, so many that I could not make out a single word. Their colors wound each of us in unnameable, and different ways. By day they are the splayed hands of children held up in self-wonderment. At night they are the flutterings of dying birds. Lighting my way with a dandelion I hold in one hand like a sparkler, in the other a jar of fireflies, I make my way through the forking darkness as the leafless trees climb the night like stairs. please note: art by Yayoi Kusama, Fireflies on Water

by Julia Kasdorf The window frame catches a draft that smells of dead leaves and wet street, and I wrap arms around my knees, look down on these small breasts, so my spine forms a curve as perfect as the rim of the moon. I want to tell the man sleeping curled as a child beside me that this futon is a raft. The moon and tiny star we call sun are the parents who at last approve of us. For once, we haven't borrowed more than we can return. Stars above our cement backyard are as sharp as those that shine far from Brooklyn, and we are not bound for anything worse than we can imagine, as long as we turn on the kitchen lamp and light a flame under the pot, as long as we sip coffee from beautiful China-blue cups and love the steam of the shower and thrusting our feet into trousers. As long as we walk down our street in sun that ignites red leaves on the maple, we will see faces on the subway and know we may take our places somewhere among them.

Lonely Lake by Joyce Kennedy It was the name given it on our hiking map. Intrigued, we followed a narrow, rising trail flecked with autumn, aspen leaves beneath our feet, young trees leaning across as if to guard the integrity of loneliness. At the end, we found the lake, small jewel shining in space, not obviously frequented, although there was a rickety dock and on it, a battered rowboat and dented canoe. No paddles. We sat, one in rowboat, one in canoe, the loneliness of the lake pared down to bare essentials— shore lined with thick, dark pine, intense and cloudless sky, sun flaring on water's changing surface. A hawk dipped down to startle the peace while two ducks rode the ripples unperturbed. Stunned by beauty, we reached across— boat to canoe, canoe to boat—to touch hands, our own lonely selves connecting as lightly and effortlessly as the dragonfly wing that earlier brushed against my face.

by Sharon Bryan My best lover ever is dead. And the second best. Nothing to do with me, it was years since I'd seen them. Still, they took something with them no one else knows about me, and if I know it, I know only half, like every other line of a poem.

by Katha Pollitt Everywhere I look I see my fate. In the subway. In a stone. On the curb where people wait for the bus in the rain. In a cloud. In a glass of wine. When I go for a walk in the park it's a sycamore leaf. At the office, a dull pencil. In the window of Woolworth's my fate looks back at me through the shrewd eyes of a dusty parakeet. Scrap of newspaper, dime in a handful of change, down what busy street do you hurry this morning, an overcoat among overcoats, with a train to catch, a datebook full of appointments? If I called you by my name would you turn around or vanish round the corner, leaving a faint odor of orange-flower water, tobacco, twilight, snow?

by Katha Pollitt It's better to be a cat than to be a human. Not because of their much-noted grace and beauty— their beauty wins them no added pleasure, grace is only a cat's way of getting without fuss from one place to another— but because they see things as they are. Cats never mistake a saucer of milk for a declaration of passion or the crook of your knees for a permanent address. Observing two cats on a sunporch, you might think of them as a pair of Florentine bravoes awaiting through slitted eyes the least lapse of attention— then slash! the stiletto or alternately as a long-married couple, who hardly notice each other but find it somehow a comfort sharing the couch, the evening news, the cocoa. Both these ideas are wrong. Two cats together are like two strangers cast up by different storms on the same desert island who manage to guard, despite the utter absence of privacy, chocolate, useful domestic articles, reading material, their separate solitudes. They would not dre...

by Pat Schneider Only once in every twenty-four hours the train comes through my town—in the dark, still center of the night. Sometimes I am awake to hear it, its wail a long sound-tunnel back to another time, another place. 1934. Early March in southern Missouri, northern Arkansas. The air cold, the night wind hard in the open doorway of a boxcar headed south toward Louisiana. My mother told me this in the winter of her dying. Always she said my father was just no good—her Ozark accent persisting to the end: a woman warshed and rinched the clothes. A man who didn't treat a woman right was just no good. It was the heart of the Depression, she said. I never did tell this to anyone—I was so ashamed. We wanted to go to see Papa and Mama in the Socialist Colony down in Louisiana, but we didn't have any money. So we rode the rails. One night a man in the boxcar with us said, "If y'all know what's good for you, you'll jump right now....

Letter I To Mrs. Saville, England "...I am already far north of London; and as I walk in the streets of Petersburgh, I feel a cold northern breeze play upon my cheeks, which braces my nerves, and fills me with delight. Do you understand this feeling? This breeze, which has travelled from the regions towards which I am advancing, gives me a foretaste of those icy climes. Inspirited by this wind of promise, my day dreams become more fervent and vivid. I try in vain to be persuaded that the pole is the seat of frost and desolation; it ever presents itself to my imagination as the region of beauty and delight. There, Margaret, the sun is for ever visible, its broad disc just skirting the horizon, and diffusing a perpetual splendour. There--for with your leave, my sister, I will put some trust in preceding navigators--there snow and frost are banished; and, sailing over a calm sea, we may be wafted to a land surpassing in wonders and in beauty every region hitherto discovered on ...

Shopping for Homecoming dresses, hither... and yon..

by Lisa Martin-Demoor Memory at its finest lacks corroboration —no photographs, no diaries— nothing to pin the past on the present with, to make it stick. Just because you've got this idea of red fields stretching along the tertiary roads of Saskatchewan, like blazing, contained fires — just because somewhere in your memory there's a rust-coloured pulse taking its place among canola yellow and flax fields the huddled blue of morning azures— just because you want to doesn't mean you can build a home for that old, peculiar ghost. Someone tells you you've imagined it, that gash across the ripe belly of summer, and for a year, maybe two, you believe them. Maybe you did invent it, maybe as you leaned, to escape the heat, out the Pontiac's backseat window you just remembered it that way because you preferred the better version. Someone tells you this. But what can they know of faith? To ask you to leave behind this insignificance. This innocence that can't be proved: ...

by Franz Wright What is today's date? Who is the President? How great a danger do you pose, on a scale of one to ten? What does "people who live in glass houses" mean? Every symphony is a suicide postponed, true or false? Should each individual snowflake be held accountable for the avalanche? Name five rivers. What do you see yourself doing in ten minutes? How about some lovely soft Thorazine music? If you could have half an hour with your father, what would you say to him? What should you do if I fall asleep? Are you still following in his mastodon footsteps? What is the moral of "Mary Had a Little Lamb"? What about his Everest shadow? Would you compare your education to a disease so rare no one else has ever had it, or the deliberate extermination of indigenous populations? Which is more puzzling, the existence of suffering or its frequent absence? Should an odd numb...

by Hal Sirowitz Now that I'm sick & have all this time to contemplate the meaning of the universe, Father said, I understand why I never did it before. Nothing looks good from a prone position. You have to walk around to appreciate things. Once I get better I don't intend to get sick for a while. But if I do I hope I get one of those diseases you can walk around with.

by Barbara Crooker Today, the sky's the soft blue of a work shirt washed a thousand times. The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. On the interstate listening to NPR, I heard a Hubble scientist say, "The universe is not only stranger than we think, it's stranger than we can think." I think I've driven into spring, as the woods revive with a loud shout, redbud trees, their gaudy scarves flung over bark's bare limbs. Barely doing sixty, I pass a tractor trailer called Glory Bound, and aren't we just? Just yesterday, I read Li Po: "There is no end of things in the heart," but it seems like things are always ending—vacation or childhood, relationships, stores going out of business, like the one that sold jeans that really fit— And where do we fit in? How can we get up in the morning, knowing what we do? But we do, put one foot after the other, open the window, make coffee, watch the steam curl up and disappear. At night, the scent ...

by Jane Gentry ... I eat an artichoke in front of the Charles Street Laundromat and watch the clouds bloom into white flowers out of the building across the way. The bright air moves on my face like the touch of someone who loves me. Far overhead a dart-shaped plane softens through membranes of vacancy. A ship, riding the bright glissade of the Hudson, slips past the end of the street. Colette's vagabond says the sun belongs to the lizard that warms in its light. I own these moments when my skin like a drumhead stretches on the frame of my bones, then swells, a bellows filled with sacred breath seared by this flame, this happiness. please note: photo by Ariel D. Bravy

by Ann Stanford I wake with the rain. It has surprised me. First, delight, Then I think of outdoors: The shovels and rakes I left in the garden Rusting now in the mist, The splintering of handles. I think of car windows open Tricycles Canvas cots, trash cans The hay uncovered Mildew. Well, they are out. And the animals - The cat, he is gone The dog is the neighbor's The horses have a tin roof If they will stay under it. And the wild things are there - Birds, wet in the trees, Deer in the brush, rabbits in hiding. The leaves will all be washed The wild lilacs, the walnuts. I am sleepy and warm I dream of the great horned owl Snatching birds like plums out of trees.

It's raining today in CinCity. A continuous drizzle in a grey and chilly day, but I don't care. I've spent the last 6 days at the hospital, not all of it 12 hour shifts, but enough of it, and I am thrilled to be in my sweats with a hot cup of coffee, rain or shine. Inspector Clousseau, the loan appraiser, has come and gone and our loan for the lake property is being "processed." My 8 hour Neuro lecture is finished, as was my voice that evening and the next day. The new committee I'm now heading has brand new notebooks, pens, and color coded divider tabs. Bliss in a bag. The next four days are all mine, except for driving HoneyHaired around and volunteering Saturday afternoon at the church festival. Tonight, I'm planning on roasted chicken and red potatoes and using the leftovers for curried chicken salad. On second thought, I'd best roast two chickens. We do love the chicken salad. The consignment store down the street is having a "bin sale."...

by Hal Sirowitz "When you have blown your nose, you should not open your handkerchief and inspect it, as though pearls or rubies had dropped out of your skull." The Book of Manners (1958) After you have blown your nose, Father said, it's not polite to look inside your handkerchief to see what it looks like. You're not a doctor. What's more important is getting the handkerchief back into your pocket without staining your pants. There are some things it's better not to look at. It should be left to your imagination, but if you have a strong desire to look you can always find pictures of it in a medical book.