Shane looked down at the familiar pattern of scratches on the floor, a lopsided snowflake etched by years of boot heels and chair legs. As he did every week, he found the sooty remnant of blue electrical tape that he’d always treated as center stage, or as a spot close enough to center that the emcee never corrected his placement.
He pulled the rickety wooden chair half an inch forward and eased into it without moving the guitar. As he fixed its tuning and adjusted his capo over the second fret, he looked at the sparse crowd, scanning the foreheads so as not to distract himself with eye contact.
Shane thought through the short set he was about to play, and about whether his voice felt up to it after a long shift taking drink orders.…
...continue reading
A crescent moon smiles over Big Piney Ridge
frozen above the black cross-stitching of the forest canopy
chilling anatomy of arteries veins and capillaries
endlessly branching from trunk and stem
with roots groping for my boots
through the crusty snow.
– Edward Sheehy…
...continue reading
“The game has been delayed,” Pappy told us through the open kitchen window. The lack of air conditioning in the house is what had brought all of us outside to the back porch. We were witnessing the reason for the delay; a wicked thunderstorm had settled itself nicely over Baltimore that afternoon. The winds came first, followed by the rain that pummeled the tin roof that covered us. The roar of approaching thunder was in the distance. My two younger brothers were hugging tight to mom, while I sat with grandma on the opposite lawn chair. I tried my best to look unafraid, but I, too, hated thunderstorms.
The screen door banged loudly against the frame as Pappy, adorned in the outfit I will always remember him in, handed mom a plate of thickly sliced heirloom tomatoes sprinkled with salt and pepper.…
...continue reading
Jo-Jo entered commercial establishments sideways, facing right. He hailed taxis with his right arm. During company staff meetings, he planted himself in the end seat, POV starboard. Did Jo-Jo have a psychological problem? OCD? Did an animal eat the left side of his face? Answer: No. Jo-Jo was a mixed-race baby. But not in the way you would think. He is racially divided down the middle. Entire right side, head to toe, white. Left side, Black. Body parts, even-steven.
So why did Jo-Jo’s white right precede the rest of him? He found that people are more likely to take him seriously. Or even take him at all. This is not a practice he pulled out of his nether region, but the result of twenty-five years of societal experience. …
...continue reading
MOTHER opens the window.
MOTHER, who sits beside me, her breasts bare in the moonlight that invades our small apartment, opens the window. Father watches intently as the figures on the television screen fight one another. Close the damn window, he says. Mother obliges.
MOTHER, who wears a red dress and heels, opens the window. She kisses me on the cheek and waves the nanny goodbye. I do not notice she is gone.
FATHER opens the window, and with it memories of his past come rushing in through the air and into his drunken spirit. Mother places a blanket over him when he falls onto the sofa. He wakes when everyone else is asleep. Father opens the window of my bedroom and kisses me goodnight.…
...continue reading
the Hudson has a magnet smell
dark water railroad track
spongy grass
rocks scattered wrappers tossed
the Hudson has a railroad depot
abandoned revived
a party for
a cousin turning eighty
the freight trains go by
a long chain clanging
guests turn not hearing
each other the roar subsides
stranger beside me
remembers Johnny Mathis
and I do yes Chances Are
didn’t sex send sparks
we compare he saw Miles at a dive
I saw Ahmad Jamal come what may
his Poinsiana I’ll learn
to love forever
he loves certain lyrics
a guide on how to live
four years
since his wife died
he leaves keeps returning
his pressing need
for the forgotten prelude
to Hello Young Lovers
and then he has it
when the earth smelled of summer
and the river
and the sky was streaked with white
we sing beyond us
the huge barge of trash
pushed by a small tugboat
navigates the Hudson
– Holly Guran
Author’s Note: The Hudson River that flowed below my childhood home, the high school I attended, and my close relatives’ town is always a force in my work.…
...continue reading
I have not talked yet about the flies. But they are so much part of what has happened, is happening, that any portrait of our collective misery is incomplete without them. They are the buzzing, maddening accompaniment to all our fears, all our sorrows. In the beginning, they invaded our city singly— that is, a few barely noticed droning little aerial grotesqueries, one alighting its bristled limbs on a streetlamp, another on the underside of the bookshelf, still another on someone’s bare arm— then in great black droves, altering the color and tone of the air.
At first, no one commented on them much because, in addition to having other matters to contend with, warmer weather always brought them in fairly considerable numbers into our city, even during ordinary years, and so they were nuisances that we all knew well.…
...continue reading