Pink Behavior
On Good Friday, I wolfed down God-worthy pizza. Pizza gives me heartburn. Still, I worshiped every mozzarella and pepperoni bite at our 2nd and Clement apartment. Three-hundred square feet […]
Fever through Time
If you and your fever existed in the European Middle Ages, you would have ingested a dose of lapis lazuli pigment to cure your ailment. That’s how the thinking […]
Within My Body’s Garden
Tonight I’ll sleep in perennial growth with a freshly bought amaranth sprouting on my bedside pine. First, I must grow a friendship with my neighbor Berry. We live on […]
In Queen Cleo’s Kingdom
My neighbor Cleo is the reincarnated Cleopatra. Do you believe me? Surely you believe me. Cleo possesses the same curly black hair, aquiline nose, and skin the same shade […]
Sienna’s Walk
An Oakland night shimmies down daylight’s throat as I anchor my ten-pound terrier Sienna to a brown leash. Out the door on Pleasant Valley Ave, we amble on cracked […]
Within the History of Severed Heads,
Mike the Chicken kept on clucking for eighteen months. Don’t expect that from a beheaded human yet a wine-vine growth pours out a story that Anne Boleyn tried […]
Smoke Break
In between his smoke puffs,my brother Barry saidwith a fresh split lip, “You know some Neanderthalswere redheads like me.”“Does that make you a Neanderthal?” “They’re our cousins.Maybe I’m my own […]
My Place is Here
I. I do not see I do much good, but I cannot leave. Some youngster holds on to me convulsively. I do what I can: stop with him, sit near […]
I Hold the Marrow
“In Brooklyn, in an old vault, mark’d by no special recognition, lie huddled at this moment the undoubtedly authentic remains of the staunchest and earliest patriots from the British prison […]
In the Age of Blood and Heat,
I breathe. The surgeon removes loose splinters of bone from the neighborhood of a soldier’s wound. A bloodless, brown-skinn’d face with eyes billowing in blue flame grit, he bears […]