MacGillivray: Song for the Mira

Out on the Mira on warm afternoons, Old men go fishing with black line and spoons; And if they catch nothing they never complain, And I wish I was with them again. As boys in the boats call to girls on the shore, Teasing the ones that they dearly adore; And into the evening the [...]

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Plath: Morning Song

Love set you going like a fat gold watch. The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry Took its place among the elements. Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival. New statue. In a drafty museum, your nakedness Shadows our safety. We stand round blankly as walls. I’m no more your mother Than the cloud [...]

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I sit on my foot

I sit on my foot While hunched in my chair. I look like a toddler And people stare. I sat in a café. The guy who was there Told me I must keep My foot off the chair. Since then, I’ve decided That I wouldn’t dare Try writing where they don’t Let feet on their [...]

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Melodrama: Driving

They were teenage twins in a silver car they’d named Jenny. Veronica was driving; Rachel was in the passenger seat; a Scottish folk artist was in the CD player, singing hypnotically like a hot bath from a sampler album. Jenny was on her way to the local Japanese steakhouse to celebrate that, after a seemingly [...]

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Criticism

Like a very shallow gutter, I’ll accept criticism poured from a thimble, or maybe a drizzle of it from the sky. But, good Lord, a real rain and I’m a trench, not a gutter.

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Your Reflection

Don’t be fooled by the similarity in their shapes: A hand-held mirror cannot tell a story through true human eyes as realistically as a spoon.

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Specimens

WARNING: This one is gross. Don’t read it while eating. During one of our move-outs, Mom insisted we get rid of that jar of dissection specimens. Dead animals. Walking down into a 1927 basement on a windy night in a rattley-windowed old house, the last thing you’d want to see is a glazed-over frog staring [...]

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When Writers Are Children

Every beginning writer is strange, but I was just weird. As a very young child, I wore a basket on my head, for want of the sagging pink Easter bonnet that it always seemed to be my sister’s turn to wear. Then, after years of refusing to wear underwear and then refusing to wear clothes [...]

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Everyone Is Watching Me

from the diary of a paranoid little puppy… ~~~~~~~~~~~~ I wonder what kind of sicko I must be that, now that I’m letting down the hems of my thoughts, every male thinks I secretly want him, and every woman thinks I secretly want her boyfriend, husband, father, grandfather… What a painful way to walk down [...]

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Ken and the Elephant

As children, my sister and I knew how to scoop our garbage into unsuspecting characters. When one character, Ken, got an elephant instead of a dog – as our story went – he cried so hard and for so long, he flooded the city with his tears. All our other little characters – Mary, Oreo, [...]

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