• Life

    From Adrienne Rich’s “Twenty-One Love Poems”

    No one’s fated or doomed to love anyone. The accidents happen, we’re not heroines, they happen in our lives like car crashes, books that change us, neighborhoods we move into and come to love. Tristan und Isolde is scarcely the story, women at least should know the difference between love and death. No poison cup, no penance. Merely a notion that the tape-recorder should have caught some ghost of us: that tape-recorder not merely played but should have listened to us, and could instruct those after us: this we were, this is how we tried to love, and there are the forces they had ranged against us, and these are…

  • Life

    Memorial Day by Dennis Caraher

    High school band. Memorial Day. Country cemetery. Marched all the way. We stood in formation, took off our caps. Stood with the nation, we played taps Year before Kennedy, year before King. Last year I cared about anything. But for that moment, we were one. Honoring soldiers At Arlington. Notes drifted across the plains. Swallows signaled oncoming rain. Station wagons, pickup trucks Rescued us then turned to rust We put on new uniforms Crisp, creased. Tattered, well-worn Some forget where we come from Some come to rest In Arlington When he was twelve, took my only son Lost ourselves in the Smithsonian Then Abraham, above the Mall. Then raised our…

  • Life

    After a Noisy Night  by Laure-Anne Bosselaar

    The man I love enters the kitchen with a groan, he just woke up, his hair a Rorschach test. A minty kiss, a hand on my neck, coffee, two percent milk, microwave. He collapses on a chair, stunned with sleep, yawns, groans again, complains about his dry sinuses and crusted nose. I want to tell him how much he slept, how well, the cacophony of his snoring pumping in long wheezes and throttles–the debacle of rhythm–hours erratic with staccato of pants and puffs, crescendi of gulps, chokes, pectoral sputters and spits. But the microwave goes ding! A short little ding! – sharp as a guillotine–loud enough to stop my words…

  • Life

    Remembering who you are.

    I’m having trouble just being happy lately. Unfortunately when adversity happens we forget ourselves. It’s normal I suppose but it’s upsetting and brings a sense of helplessness. Sometimes it just takes a friend to remind us. My friends do this. Thank you, Fred. – Posted from my iPhone Location:Old Plymouth Rd,Sagamore Beach,United States

  • Life

    Favorite ‘Story Songs’

    Based on a creative idea from Gedeon Maheux of iconfactory fame, here is my (horribly late) Story Songs post. Please be kind. I thought it would only be fair to use the songs I thought of right off the bat when Ged first mentioned the idea. However I feel compelled to explain a bit about where they come from. I liked the idea of the blog post first because it sounded fun and would get me motivated to write a little something, but I also liked it because I’ve always been a fan of songs with a little novelty to them. I think its something that could paint me in…

  • Life

    Who you are.

    So yesterday I found out that I am a Schwenkfelder. I dont know the exact details specifically, but enough to say with confidence I belong to this group of people with the goofy name. Years ago, when my Uncle Mark and I went on one of our walkabouts, we visited my Grandfather’s home town of Lancaster PA. We drove around, I saw some roads named Schultz, and some old graveyards with Schultz’s buried there, the headstones carved in german, the dates going back to the 1700’s. I didnt think much about it until Mark and I spoke again last night, and he casually mentioned genology work he had done years…