Endless autumn train tracks – all these great abandoned houses and their fallow fields.
You get used to it. The endless hours. The blur of yellowing
Trees, and time, and bridges. Every two-exit town looks the same,
Toothpick diorama of a farm. What am I supposed to learn about life
Here, amid all the loneliness? Perhaps the elegance of a withering
Willow by the bridge. To be alone but not hollow, solitary but not lost.
You’re a hard friend to make and harder to keep, and I’m starting to think
That maybe you’re not worth keeping. In the grass, the implication
Of a body. In the car, the ghost of a great-
Aunt’s mediocre love. I’m not sorry for wanting
You to kiss me in the bathroom hallway but I’m sorry
That it didn’t happen before our friends came through the door.…
...continue reading
Take Up
Meeting, kissing, thinking, not thinking, talking, not talking. No need to think and talk. No need to wonder why anything is. It just is. This is what love is. It’s about passion. It’s about the sex. The sex is passionate. It is brilliant. Yes.
Shake Up
So much so all my past experiences are thrown into the air. I am questioning everything that went for sex before. How could I have lived the years I’ve lived and never seen sex could be like this? All my ideas and former awarenesses break up; go bitty. Rattle around.
Fake Up
I am happy in the bedroom but…..
What about sometimes when we are out together? What about when we are sitting at the table, say? Or sitting down together somewhere not at the table?…
...continue reading
She always had to run to school. Run fast. If she didn’t wake by 4 am, it meant that she got behind on her chores, of which there were many for a girl of thirteen, and then she had to run. She would get up and put on a pot of water for the tea and porridge. Then she would run a short bath for herself—this was her favourite part of the morning routine because the cold water woke her up – and then she would get her mother out of bed and into her wheelchair.
The girl would take her mother to the bathroom and help her to relieve herself, bathe, and dress. They would finally return to the kitchen where the huge pot was now boiling, making the window above the stove steam up, obscuring the brightening world outside.…
...continue reading
to get to the waterfall
you must go straight up
to go beyond you must
take the trail beside it
there is canopy everywhere
and a rush of noise
to guide you
south are trails
to the interstate
and to the abandoned
bridges that cross them
beyond that the trail
flattens out i hear. i do not know.
i’ve never been
and no one who goes that way returns
the things we miss
we will miss forever
– J.E. O’Leary…
...continue reading
In the weeks following the B-cell, non-Hodgkins Lymphoma diagnosis, Mom sat up in the adjustable hospital bed, lucid, and chipper. Except on shower days. She was distraught about contending with her freshly permed hair. Beside herself on how unnatural kinks following a shower and shampoo would spoil her look.
“I should have my hair straight like yours. It would be much easier to take care of.” You did not just say that. After all those humiliating home perms you inflicted on me? After a lifetime of imitating your burden of having splendidly coiffed hair? Obsessing over split-ends, cowlicks, curl flattening humidity, chemically over-processed frizz, butchered cuts, and mismatched dyes from color blind stylists?
I dried her hair and shaped it with the curling iron, watching out so I didn’t brand her neck or singe my fingers.…
...continue reading
It was barely noticeable when it began, no more than a zephyr, sighing, stirring the dusty ochre earth to eddy around the soles of her boots. She paid it no mind, the restless air. Not in this country. Not in this season. The sun? That was different, and she raised a weathered hand against its onslaught as she stepped from what little shade was offered by a torn scrap of faded canvas canopy that hung askew above the entryway.
A red car, a two-door import by the look of it, had rolled to a stop beside the only working pump. The radio, blaring rock music, went silent when the engine was cut and the driver’s door swung open. Out stepped a young man, on the shy side of twenty-five, she guessed. …
...continue reading
Walt takes no comfort reminiscing about his youth. Tales of simpler times and way back when settle like pits in his stomach. For those with nothing to hide, perhaps long-ago decades truly were simpler. But for those free only in shadow, secretly living beyond acceptable societal standards, those memories breed only misery.
His grandchildren bring him pictures they find in his wife’s “treasure” boxes. They shove crinkled black and white images in his face and ask him questions about “olden days”. Each one slices open an unhealed wound, a shattered dream, a life dismantled. When he’s on the edge of tears, he picks up a newspaper and pretends to read. Walt’s wife steps in, nudging the children away from his recliner. Grandpa is old, she tells them, his hearing isn’t what it used to be.…
...continue reading