It’s California 1956. Land of pink, baby blue and gold-flocked Christmas trees spun with silver tinsel. The sun is warm. The trees are real but take on the aura of Walt Disney’s Fantasyland, where we all flocked for a dose of wanting to be in another place and time. ...
1. My very first memory is a Christmas memory. I was two and three-quarters, in the words of a 1967 me. My father, a Lieutenant Commander in the Navy, was in Vietnam. My mother was at St. Luke’s Hospital, giving birth to her third child and first son. Teenage boy...
Rejection has been my middle name lately when it comes to submitting poetry to literary journals. But apparently, according to more experienced poets, that’s a good thing. One poet emailed me, “If you’re not getting rejected 95% of the time,...
“Don’t sweat the small stuff,” they say, followed quickly by, “It’s all small stuff.” My list below may be small stuff, but it’s the stuff that makes my cork rise, the stuff of ahhhhh, the stuff that for a moment makes all the other nonsense melt away. An...
CREATING OURSELVES AS WORKS OF ART – or – Telling the Mental Monkey-Bullies to Go Suck Eggs Have you ever read something so fan-DAMN-tastic that you thought to yourself, Well, Self, that’s it. Hang up your hat because you will never write anything that...
First sip of coffee in the morning; going to bed knowing I can drink another cup of coffee tomorrow. Saying, “Look at the sunset” to my son and watching him turn his head. Popeye’s fried chicken for dinner (from a busy location, of course, with particularly crispy...
My dear poets, You still have time to send us your wonderfully crafted chapbook manuscripts for Minerva Rising’s “Dare to Be” chapbook contest judged by the poet Heather McHugh. I’ve written three poetry chapbooks and have learned some lessons...
My family is from diets. The lips, the jaws, the tongue of diets. My entire childhood was passed through the stomach of listening to my family go from one diet to the next. It was searching for The Dead Sea Scrolls, The Holy Grail or Indiana Jones and the lost...
So many hungers in me. A gorge rimmed red with teeth howls from in my bowels. Ready to suck in and mash, tear limb from limb, the frailest offering, a bonbon. Clamp down with the weight and forgivelessness of … life. Chew and chew and chew and spew out the bits...
If you noticed the Halloween candy for sale in August, you know it has been the “holiday season” for some time. But now it is really the holiday season. All of the winter spices and root vegetables, not to mention desserts, will bring back memories. Use these scents...
