Author’s Note: As an East Coast suburban boy, light pollution meant I never saw the Milky Way until a trip out West. Our children were getting older, soon to college and busy lives, and only my wife had ever been to the southwest, so we planned a trip for December 2018. That moment—to try to put into words what it means to look up and be dazzled, even when you intellectually know what you’re going to see—still fills me with wonder. [Continue Story]
Writer’s Note: In this poem, I imagine my future dying process, hopefully “years from now,” surrounded by quiet, love, nature, and music. The scene is borrowed from a real place, Commonweal Retreat Center in Bolinas, California, where many have found solace and healing. The poem has since been included in my chapbook “A Doctor Only Pretends: Poems about illness, death, and in-between” and reviewed by poet Matthew Lippman in Tikkun Magazine...[Continue Story]
Author’s Note: “Fried Chicken, 1981” is a portrait of my mother when I was a child. I wanted to say her name the way her mother said her name. I wanted to capture the way she spoke and her mannerisms. I wanted to acknowledge her youthfulness in the context of aging. I wanted to point to the everyday experience of expressing love and care by making dinner. And of course, I wanted to write down how she made fried chicken.....[Continue Story]
Author’s Note: The Elements of Drawing is a famous instructional text by the 19th c. English art critic and philosopher John Ruskin. It’s a book I recently picked up when I considered trying my hand at drawing, again. Ruskin made a political project out of training the eye and hand to represent the truth of the world, and it inspired my attempt to apply his lessons to the troubles of our present age....[Continue Story]
Author’s Note: I turned eighty recently, in a world that seems increasingly crazy and disjointed. For me now, making some sense of that world is less a matter of big ideas than of small actions. Like carpenters who nail together a home for the senile, or the homeless man for whom bus routes map the...[Continue Story]
Author’s Note: “First Light” is based on a true story from my own history and my mother’s history. There are moments in our lives when we have glimpses into our parents’ formative experiences and what they might have struggled through as children. The speaker in the poem spends her own night thinking about her mother “as that little girl,” and there is a sense she can relate to her mother’s childhood loss, her worry. The poem opens with dawn and closes with a new sense of dawn, one that strengthens the connection between mother and daughter and touches on a faith that things can “be made right again.”... [Continue Story]
Author’s Note: “An Experience of Grief” is an effort to put down into words the wordless horror that is grief. The concept and the structure of the poem are inspired by a grounding technique that is popular as a coping mechanism for various mental health issues. This technique aims to ground one in space and time by using the senses to observe and reconnect to the physical world. By interrogating the feeling of grief in this manner and attaching physical sensations to it, it is my hope that the inexpressible has become slightly more expressible... [Continue Story]
Author’s Note: I’ve long loved Walt Whitman’s work for many reasons, and this piece—“Walt Whitman at the Playground”—echoes one of them: his enthusiastic joy at everyday moments, a joy that often strikes me as augmented by an ever-present thought for mortality. I wrote the poem at the playground in question, watching my daughters at play and the people around me, grateful that we were all alive together at this one moment... [Continue Story]
Author’s Note: The unseen forces that surround us and shape our lives are so fascinating—and I mean the literal ones, like magnetism or gravity, not just the metaphysical ones, though I also have doubts about how different those really are. If the spiritual and metaphysical are anywhere, then they’re here, they’re now, they’re ordinary and constant. They’re in humankind and they’re also in the magnetic doorstop... [Continue Story]
Author's Note: "Sometimes poets have epiphanies—sometimes we simply turn on the radio. I was listening to NPR when I heard the delightful tidbit that inspired this poem. I took words cut from magazines ... [Continue Story]
