The Bookends Review

The palm reader, garbed in a cascaded Romani dress,
red headscarf & golden hoop earrings, took my tired

hands in hers. She whispered, my dress suggests I am
pure, I’m free of illusion &, with your spirit-trust, I’ll see the

trails leading into you. Into all you hide from. I’d found
her accidently, off an old road w/ moss-tongued trees

& a few junked cars, rundown & lost. Two dogs, their
soiled faces peering through fence slots, & a wet garden

of vegetables hard-hit by nibbling rabbits & whitetail deer.
I was a man of blackened branches, looking for what

might have moved in me, had I willed it or wished it so.
She leaned close to me, felt the flexure lines of my hand,

those deltas of tension – longing, remorse, yearning, hurt –
& said that the hand is an un-funneled richness until we,

w/ in a life, create paths upon it that our imagination –
as a genie – creates its freedom & its hard bondage in,

&, by & by, we arrive at it, this truth, like a stunned doe.…

...continue reading

From her earliest memories, Laura Bishop had been entranced by summer flowers.  Every year, behind the small clapboard  farmhouse where she lived with her mother and father, the hillside that sloped gently up to a stand of thick woods became a dazzling carpet—coneflower and corn poppy, blue flax, indian blanket, goldenrood and New England aster. These were the names taught to her by her mother. 

“Now, your aunt Elizabeth, a very smart woman, indeed,” her mother had said, “knows every one of those flowers by their Latin names. She learned them at the college in Carbondale. I just know them by what we call them here. Good enough for me. In that I am in agreement with your father. Why do we need a foreign name when we have a perfectly fine one in good, old American?”  …

...continue reading

The night never asked permission
to swallow her whole,
my mother, with her frayed nerve endings
and shattered mirrors for eyes,
her mind a house with too many doors,
each one opening to a different self,
a different terror.
I learned silence from her trembling hands,
how love could twist into something sharp,
how the woman who gave me life
could look through me like a stranger
on a crowded street.
Pain is not a lesson,
it’s the first language you forget
but your body remembers:
the hollow where safety should be,
the silence after the scream,
the way your ribs ache
from holding so much alone.
They never tell you
how lonely healing can be
how you’ll trace your scars
like a map to places
that no longer exist,
how you’ll miss the monsters
because at least they were familiar.…

...continue reading

It begins, as most things do, quietly.

I wake just before dawn, pulled by a strange pull in my chest. I flutter outside, the world hushed and silver under a heavy moon.

Past the trees, past the fields, I find the pond.

I kneel, peering in.

At first, I search for my own reflection.
But the water only shows ripples of light – tiny glimmers, darting and blinking across the surface.

I am a star–
distant, steady, burning high above,
a fixed point to guide, impress, or outshine.…

...continue reading

Casey was pricing vinyl when she walked in. The door was open. It was early, and he normally greeted customers when he was alone, but he figured it was a regular, poking through the newest used stuff. That or Sean forgot something. Casey continued with the stack until he heard the flutter of a coat and the scrape of approaching feet. When a woman cleared her throat, he looked up.

“Not going to ask if you can help me?”

“Can I help you?”

“I guess you trust people here. Not sure I would.”

He yawned. “What brings you to Seattle?”

“Robert’s nephew, Scott. Remember him? He’s getting married.”

“Why here—doesn’t he live in L.A.?”

“His wife and her family. They’re all from Tacoma.”

“And where’s Robert?”…

...continue reading

I sat on the 18 -inch cement ledge that jutted out from the museum wall at the South entrance and looked at the fountain in front of me. It boasts 60 spouts, with a 6 -foot geyser of foaming water coming from each one. It is a big, oval- shaped fountain with a lip wide enough that sometimes you see young boys rollerblading around it, though they usually wipe out. Sometimes a particularly streamlined cyclist will attempt the circuit and jump off just as the curve tightens at either end.

Noontime. And even though fall was approaching, the sun was strong enough that I could sit out with only a sweater over my sleeveless dress, leftover from the summer. It wasn’t my lunch hour for I take that at 2:00 o’clock, a necessary defense against the long afternoons.…

...continue reading

What’s been has been. What’s done is done. Now you
can only decide what you’re going to do
about it, for one; and then say, for two,

Let’s Do It! These concerns are ethical,
the strange marriage of the emotional,
a heart’s involvement, and the logical,

a mind’s. But neither aspect’s any good
without resolve to do—not what you would
or might, having determined that you could,

but should and must, for you now see it’s right,
like someone blind given a spark of sight.

*

Of course it will be difficult to start.
That’s why it’s called a Difficulty, friend.
Taking action means we must take heart;
giving over means we just pretend.

Inertia, loud as leaders of a faction
and expert in invisibility,
seeming stillness, and false recusancy
is the eternal enemy of Action,

particularly one that bucks a trend;
eternal ally of The Sloth Within
Us, it will terrorize until The End—
unless we notice, pause, resolve, begin.…

...continue reading