RIGHT HAND MAN

Any memories from more than a couple decades ago would naturally seem like another world from now - even if our collective reality hadn’t gone and turned itself upside down, and even if I could more often remember what I did the day before yesterday.  Most details tend to get pretty fuzzy after a while, but there are always those ( Read more... )

ACCESSORIES

63 days...
   the vans have all gone
but the streets are still here

they cry out for justice.

Though faded from sight
forgotten from mind
we have not fallen quiet...
We see you.Moms and Dads ( Read more... )

LEGACY

I don’t suppose I’ve achieved enough success in my life yet to consider mine a rags to riches story, but I can certainly say I’ve come a long way from having been a child ward of the state.  Those days were an almost forgotten other world from here, way back around that bygone era when DCFS destroyed the only family I’d ever known by then ( Read more... )

THE LONG ROAD

My husband and I have been losing sleep lately, trying to convince our boy he’s not a vampire.  It’s not just the biting, and the refusing to eat people food, though, certainly those are problems worth addressing.  But how do you make a 3-yr-old understand abstract concepts like, we are diurnal creatures, child - humans are designed ( Read more... )

MISFITS

I’m not in the habit of going around saying I have “daddy issues,” though, while I haven’t looked into any sort of official diagnosis, I will admit a professional who focuses on such things might be willing to apply a more formal variation on the term to describe some of my impulsively developed coping mechanisms as a result of learning ( Read more... )

SEDATION

Around the turn of the latest century, I was in my mid-20s.  I wasn’t making great money, but it spent like plenty, for living as a single person with not so much in the way of family obligations or financial responsibilities (funny how that works).  In many respects, I had more disposal income then than I do now, even while pulling in ( Read more... )

FIRST BLOOD

The municipality of Minneapolis is across the mighty Mississippi River from the home I share with my husband and our son in the adjacent twin city, 11 miles from Cup Foods, the neighborhood grocery where a grandfather and father of three made his last commercial transaction, for a pack of cigarettes.  It became his last, after the $20 ( Read more... )

LET’S DREAM

“The Island of Sodor is surrounded by beautiful blue sea.  It has fields of green, and sandy, yellow beaches; there are rivers, streams, and lots of trees where birds sing; as well as windmills, a coal mine, docks where visitors arrive, and a profusion of railway lines...” 
...that carry anthropomorphic, sentient train engines into ( Read more... )

PINCHED

Picture it: Cicily, 1920...

Wait, no... wrong intro.  Hang on a sec...

*shut musty book of rerun memories with a bang - cough at escaping dust cloud...

...open cobweb-covered chest of childhood memories - lean in, rummaging...

...climb into chest with a clatter, tossing items around...

*owl ( Read more... )

The Hustle

“Build me a ladder to the moon,” he said,

and heaven sure knows how I’ve tried...

I’ve busted my stump til my fingers have bled,

til my marrow has ached, and some part of me died.

“Dig me a well to the core of the Earth...

...and don’t even stop ’til you’re through ( Read more... )