I brought dinner to Martin and Elouise as they sat in their usual spot in front of the window of the nursing home. It overlooked the snow-covered courtyard and although it wasn’t much it was definitely the best seat in the house. They were silent but offered me the same smile of gratitude that had become a part of our nightly routine. Their liver-spotted hands shook as they picked up their silverware, feebly cutting at the chicken pot pie, and spooning tepid bites into their dentured mouths.
I returned to the kitchen thinking of their love, a sixty-year marriage filled with children, a home, good jobs; the adjective of their life would be stability and I didn’t know if this was something to envy or to pity.…
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My older sister and I had not seen one another for a decade, had little contact during that time because of family conflict, and we were reuniting inside a hotel shaped like a pyramid. Seemed appropriate as, when children, we once posed for a picture sitting atop a perisphere replica of the 1939 World’s Fair logo with its trylon stretching upwards beside us. Trylon and perisphere. Flushing Meadow Park. 1939. Las Vegas, 1994, we were meeting in a trylon-shaped building.
From the air, as the plane was landing, that hotel looked like a geometrical piece from a child’s game. The brown desert only made its black glass triangle all the more striking.
Tired from my trip of 2000+ miles, I slowly turned my neck from side to side to stretch muscles, then pushed sides of my limp blonde hair behind my ears. …
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I’d been expecting her Uncle Pat to come
meet me and when I pulled open the door,
there he stood, filling the door frame,
big enough to blot out the sun,
made even taller by black alligator boots
dulled by the south Texas dust still clinging to them
and a black Stetson
sitting centered above a wind-weathered face.
He didn’t bother coming across the threshold.
Just took off his hat and said
Hi, I’m Pat Shannon
in a voice like a Memphis blues man and
an accent that was 4th generation San Antonio.
You the one going to marry my niece?
a question punctuated by one raised eyebrow.
Yes, that’s right, sir.
Now he stepped into the room,
came close and crooked a smile.
Well good for you.…
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A first-year teacher met her second husband in the supply room on the first day of school. He handed her the Post-it notes from the top shelf. She liked his Southern accent and his forearms. The way he had folded his shirtsleeves caught her attention, cotton like magnolia petals collapsed on the lawn of a sprawling estate. She sensed he would be important to her.
At the end of her first day in the classroom, the woman felt defeated. She cried at her desk, wondering what she had gotten herself into when he appeared in the doorframe a 6’4” Virgin Mary apparition sporting a goatee.
The faculty offices were in a back building; they were tiny dorm-like rooms, honeycombed with built-in desks and modest closets. Long ago, this space had been the living quarters of nuns from St.…
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[W]hen a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason – John Keats, Letter to George and Thomas Keats – December 1817.
The fog fades over the bay on New Year’s Day.
Pale blue surface drinking light. Flat
and glassy with a few ducks bobbing. I walk from
the Lesner Bridge to the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel.
Crisp as the calendar. Wispy clouds.
They’ve wrapped the giant supports in bolted
metal and weatherproof paint, but there’s no
such thing as permanence. Ask the poles
with no pier. Ask the dunes. Ask proud-fool
sailors about trusting the sea. The answer is laughter.
The answer is existence as long as Keats allows
and we believe in the concept known as
the second of January.…
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It looked orange when it went in the air and the sun was on it. It was easy to churn up, too. A gust of wind, a pickup truck taking too sharp a right turn, or when the women flapped their mats and rugs out of windows or off the sides of front porches. Sometimes, if you weren’t paying attention, it got in your eyes and in your throat.
Black folks lived in town and white folks lived outside town. It wasn’t always like that. Before there was a town, white folks made black folks live on and work their property under threat of whip and rifle. Once the town was established though, white folks only went into town out of necessity, and black folks avoided going outside of town.…
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Ted’s a good guy, but he’s got this rare condition called Blown-Out Heart Syndrome—or BOHS—where about once a day his heart gets blown out his back. It leaves an awful mess. It’s like his body sneezes out his heart and blood and such. I don’t know why. I’m not an expert. But his heart grows back, don’t worry.
Ted hired me in a CleanUp/Caretaker role a while ago. I used to do freelance crime scene cleaning, but now he’s got me on contract. I come in the morning and stay till the evening, waiting for Ted to have a BOHS episode and clean up afterwards. He tries to make it easy on me. For example, he’ll spend most of his day sitting in the living room with his back pointed to a blank wall.…
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