No one travels to this part of town anymore,
not since the 5:06 has been rerouted
and the filling station removed its pumps.
The sole radio station plays mostly static
cut with echoes of a distant broadcast,
the excitement of a local sporting contest.
Here it is all phantasmal and bleak.
I clearly hear the double screech overhead
and see proud brown wings flap in aerial attack.
Yet the underbird here, the smaller crow
caws loudly, like a chatty old woman
shouting out feats of raffish grandchildren.
This cackle draws an immediate response.
Black dots appear as if called out of thin air,
flying from distant branches to gather in force.
The twenty birds that populate the branches
of the early spring’s bare maple tree
understand how there is comfort in numbers.…
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I’m trying to explain to Richard why fonts matter. I’m not sure what to call Richard. Is he a blind date? Is that term even in use any longer? I don’t want to call him my internet date. The sound of that phrase is large and echoing, proof that I should just leap off the Coronado Bay Bridge and get it over with. Blind date, though, sounds as though he should have walked into Lestat’s for our coffee date tapping his cane, eyes covered by dark glasses. He didn’t. By his reaction when he saw me, I almost wish he had.
Let’s just call him Richard, then, and hope this is over soon.
“Times New Roman just has something soothing to it,” I say, sipping my soy chai.…
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I rest in the bed listening to my upstairs neighbors fighting or fornicating, it all sounds the same. It reminds me of my lonely existence. My last boyfriend left months ago and trashy novels have been my only visitor, sneaking in when they are not wanted. I bang my broom on the ceiling as they get too loud, reminding them that they have neighbors. At least our bedrooms are on the corner and they have the top floor. I am the only one they bother. I roll over with my Cosmo, reading about some woman’s drug addiction and return to the real world, pressing my ear to the pillow hoping to block out the noise. Ceiling chips down on me as it often does when they near the end.…
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Every struggling new writer who has just earned a B.A. in English needs a dose of the career advice E. B. White once gave me. He had very definite views on how to write—what to write about and then—how to get it in print.
Since Andy really didn’t like his first name, Elwyn, he always asked his friends to use his nickname “Andy” although the byline on all of his stories, articles, essays, poems and books listed him as E. B. White.
Today, children may be the only readers who truly appreciate E.B. White for his excellent stories. E.B. White’s children’s books have lived on past his death in 1985. Charlotte’s Web, Stuart Little and The Trumpet of the Swan, are still very popular.
Some students currently in college probably know that E.…
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A while ago I received an e-mail from the bank that controls all of the money I have in this world. They were enhancing their security system with a series of personal questions. The idea being that only they and I would know the answers which would be used to thwart any attempt by cyber thieves to break into my checking or savings account.
One of the proposed questions was “What was the name of the first girl you loved?” I searched back through near but never totally forgotten memory and found Joanne Donovan, the girl I’d dated three of my four years at Annapolis. She was the girl I’d escorted to my Ring Dance, two Farewell Balls, and two Army-Navy games. Joanne Donovan, a petite Audrey Hepburn look-alike, had owned my heart for the better part of three years.…
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Winter
Curl into yourself, avoid going
outside because you hate the cold.
Spend your mornings in thrift stores
hunting for old paintings and model ships
to nest into your new apartment. Run away
to North Carolina to see the boy you’ve decided
you love. Run away to Pittsburgh,
then New York City over New Years
to see this same boy. Get an inch long splinter
in the back of your thigh sliding
across a wooden bench in Brooklyn.
In March realize it’s still there.
Stay restless. Stay sad. Grow suicide plans
inside of your suicide plants, like
ivy climbing around a trellis.
Spring
Get a job again, finally. Spend all of your
afternoons listening to the ramblings
of an autistic boy — retellings of cartoon
scripts.…
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Shae strummed her guitar angrily in a fit of frustration. She’d been working on the once promising song for days now, and it seemed she was getting nowhere with it. She paused. Then she strummed the chord again, more gently this time, listening closely. To her surprise, the chord was exactly what the song called for.
Delighted, she decided to push her luck even further. As thoughtlessly as she’d strummed the first chord, she played a second, and a third. Both were perfect, almost uncannily so.
She looked up from the guitar over to where her dad’s body lay on the bedroom floor. Blood pooled around his head and shoulders where the carpeting had become saturated. Tonight must be my night for overcoming stubborn obstacles, she thought, taking her penchant for understatement to a new level.…
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