“Hey, mom. I thought you did nudes.” My 23-year-old son called from the basement. I dried my hands on my terry-cloth apron as I descended the stairs.
Alan was leaning over a carton of oil paintings. My eyes caught the word basement spelled `bastment’ by the van packers. I smiled with remembrance of my desire, at the time, to fix the word. The yellowed cloth that had covered the old carton was carelessly pushed on the concrete. The box bottom was moist and showed mildew.
“Didn’t you do nudes once?” I nodded my head and mentioned I’d left them at the Milwaukee airport. My son, now in medical school, had squeezed in oil painting classes while maintaining pre-med courses and grades. How could I save these…he pulled out two landscapes…and not nudes!…
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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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Catching the tall cylinders of wood on the
back of the chair, a skein of thin wool was
held in place so I could wind it into a ball
suitable for knitting a sweater, or socks,
hat, or mittens. Why didn’t any stores
have knitting-ready spheres rather than
coils of yarn? What if my chair’s back
didn’t have tall projections above the seat?
Round and round the fibers changed from
long strands to what resembled a child’s
plaything. Ready. I can begin. Begin.
This long-sentenced piece is what
pleases a literary editor who sees words
in run-on, and it’s designed to extend
as a skein. For me? I usually write
with a period placed
after a short line
as if I were
typing
dot.com.
– Lois Greene Stone
Note: This piece was originally published in June 2016 by The Lake and reprinted in the Nov/Dec 2021 issue of Scarlet Leaf Review.…
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I was leery about teaching Lear
wondering what my students
might understand about dynamics
of family life. Young faces found
dreams and fairy dust appealing but
“Midsummer Night’s Dream”
seemed silly as a Puck, to them,
is a hockey item. And Hero
definitely would be “Much Ado
About Nothing” since comedy
has four-letter words spouted by
jeans-clad entertainers. “Hamlet”
tragedy isn’t as terrible as a broken
cell-phone or wondering where is
a wi-fi hookup. 1603. Sounds like
a zip code with missing numbers.
“O, blood, blood, blood!”, “Othello”
more suited to students television
preferences. “To be or not to be”
teaching Shakespeare, “that is
the question.”
– Lois Greene Stone
Note: This piece was originally published by The Lake in May 2016 and reprinted by Scarlet Leaf Review in June 2020.…
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What colors paint
pandemic?
The wood pallette,
streaked with some
dried oils that
stubbornly defied
turpentine, did not
want darkness and
fear hues. Sable
brushes with a
faint odor of linseed
oil stood ready.
Protective mask,
fitted vinyl gloves
seemed out of place
near an easel used
to hold stretched
canvas. Fear, in
twenty-twenty,
would not be
recorded by my
tools. I opened
the tube of cadmium
yellow squeezing
sunlight instead
of anxiety.
– Lois Greene Stone
Note: This poem was first published in May 2020 by Scarlet Leaf Review.…
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