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 for hours. II. The Brooklyn frost of Dec 16, ’62 crowded the Whitman family windows. On North Portland Avenue, I snatched up the Tribune, […]
“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 ships.” Epigraph to “The Wallabout Martyrs” by Walt Whitman Louisa cooked a full boil stew as I flung myself out the door. Down Flushing […]
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 the operation in silence as the circular-cut saw does its talking to the wound in question. A February candle-light announces the impending […]
A week after the Apollo 11 landing, I sip a fresh pour of coffee before my scrambled eggs and toast among a line of Saturday customers at the shared countertop. Barbara, a regular who holds a strawberry jam bottle with stories in her hands, asks, “Do you need the jam? I don’t […]
I slurp coffee with cream on a Lake Merritt bench across from waters flowing like imported coffee into commuting mouths. Shit. Underpaid or unpaid hands surely plucked these Columbian coffee beans that gives my American brain such a sweet caffeinated kick. Once I jolt up in denim jeans, I spring back to the […]
Our eyes snap open into the shards of a shattered night after sleep nested on our branch bodies. Outside our open bedroom glass, Black-Crowned Night-Herons sleep in their familial nest. While we lie entangled on our queen bed in a clean sheet union, my ears rattle when a homeless man’s moaning trounces the papa heron […]
After I watched Top Gun up in my room, I dyed my blonde hair black, threw on some aviators, and grabbed my dad’s car keys. Oh, and I had to grab the last Bud in the fridge. Maybe there was a Pete “Maverick” Mitchell lookalike contest in the basement of the Y on Harrison […]
Beside lapping water, I wander on Lakeshore Avenue. When a leashed Golden Retriever yelps, I’m startled out of my stupor in a black pool between lampposts aglow. Opposite the stairs that squeezes the echo of the Cleveland Cascade’s cascading flow, a Canary Island Pine sings a ballad. I stop and […]
You tumble out of Montgomery BART. Up up. Skyscrapers bully your downtown eyes where lofting steel slides into the keyhole of San Francisco fog. Wait you think: who’s this Montgomery that branded Montgomery BART? John Montgomery is branded in history as a Civil War rear admiral who raised an American flag over the town […]
In the last solar year, I cyclically visited the last Macy’s in Denver. Right at the entrance, a mannequin’s whiplash stare lashed me up and down as I strolled around the jeans, collared shirts, and khaki pants. A virgin in my skin and mind, I couldn’t stop hooking my eyeballs onto the mannequin I named […]