-

SATURDAY MORNING, WINTER
The radio is suddenly blaring and the clock of the stove says seven o’clock but the window retorts it is winter when there is no time. You pull up your collar as you prepare to leave. At the store, pick up a baguette, it will go well with a pork tenderloin with a sauce of…
-

LISTEN TO YOUR MOTHER, NOT
My mother used to say, about most anything, “Stop, you’ve had your fill.” It was something she did by rote, dictated I was certain then, by some timer buried deep within her that brought forth the phrase like the beep of an oven timer to indicate whenever she was baking was certain to be just…
-

TWO HAIKU
the morning dew smiles the rising sun stares deeply later a merger the egret stands fixed wishing he was a statue the rippling pond laughs
-

NIL
I was honored to have this recently published in Arena Magazine: A Magazine of Critical Thinking, Issue 162 from Victoria, Australia It was supposed to be the simplest of all the numbers nestled neatly in the center of the number line. For years its logic evaded our efforts to comprehend its simplicity. It didn’t look…
-

RIVER
I know I should find a river and just sit on its banks and stare at the water flowing I don’t have to step in it once to know I couldn’t step in twice if I wanted, so that problem’s solved. And with dry feet, I can walk along its banks with a bit more…
-

EARLY IN THE SECOND BOOK
She wrapped him carefully in an old blanket and several sections of the Times and put him in the basket with the broken handle she found out behind the Safeway near the culvert that was home until the rains came. She placed him among the weeds and beer bottles, where the river’s smell licked the…
-

ETUDE
Today was perfectly ordinary which is how I would have my days and how they so seldom agreed to be. I did pause and look at the Yamaha keyboard and remembered that when the Court of the Empress Theresa rejected Mozart, he attended the symphonies of Haydn as a form of consolation. That reminds me…
-

FLAME
He watched as the flame licked at the lip of the candle, the wax slowly conceding and falling in, forming the cradle on which the flame danced. He wondered how something as simple as a wax cylinder could have an inherent knowledge of beauty and simplicity and yet he stared at it certain the knowledge…
-

CRISIS
He wants to have his midlife crisis in peace and quiet. He has penciled it in his calendar for at least five years now. Something always comes up, something that demands he be in public, and he simply will not have a crisis in that setting, no matter what. He’s sure he supposed to have…
