• ALTERNATIVES

    I would much rather be home, listening to Joan Osborne on the CD player, lying on the couch with you sleeping across the sofa curled under the cotton throw coiled against the winter battering the windows ca tucked into your knees. Instead, I sit on the bed CNN droning in the background and stare out…


  • REASON

    I write poems about Wisconsin because I love the sound of the word cheese.


  • THE VILLAGES

    You are driving through the Florida that once was, that is off the coast, and out of Orlando, the Florida of jalousie windows, run down once gas stations and the more than occasional double wide. Suddenly, you are in a Disney version of a semi-tropical New England, gated villages where cars have been supplanted by…


  • FALLS

    The water pours endlessly, relentlessly over the lip, cascading into the gorge the mist rising, engulfing the rim of the falls, swallowing whole the small island, that will be eaten by the river over the next centuries. We sit in the comfort of our room, watching as if this was a movie, the water in…


  • NEVER BOATS

    “Trains are present,” she said,” and somewhat the buses, but airplanes are mostly absent.” I understand what she meant, and didn’t need her to cover hands over her ears to cement the point. On a train, most sit back, some with ear buds but many simply stare out the window at towns and villages and…


  • ONCE, ONCE

    Once, not long ago, a river meandered through our town. Actually, there was never a river here, and our town is really a small and shrinking city. But the wistful look on your face when I mentioned the river is reason enough to have one. So now I have to move somewhere in Connecticut or…


  • TRAVEL: TWO THOUGHTS

    The packed suitcase sits on the futon but neither it nor I are in any hurry to depart. 4 AM in Chicago blanketed in snow is an orange neon painting.


  • A RIVER RUNS

    Once, not long ago, a river meandered through our town. Actually, there was never a river here, and our town is really a small and shrinking city. But the wistful look on your face when I mentioned the river is reason enough to have one. So now I have to move somewhere in Connecticut or…


  • ROAD DREAM

    It’s 12 degrees the night air slices through my sweater my teeth chatter. Standing in the lot fetching my cell phone from the glove box my breath congeals around my face a cloud. I look up at the moon snowflakes dancing on my forehead. Luna’s face is shrouded by a cirrus veil, but her eyes…


  • FOOTHILL ROAD

    In the hills that rise gently from the concrete valley two hawks play childlike, rising, falling in gentle circles, grazing the redwoods that reach up to stroke their breasts. To a visitor from the East New York, Tokyo there is awe at the hawks’ grace, slicing the sky into cloudy ribbons but there is no…