Author’s Note: In my short story, Professor, I wanted to explore the complex nuance of sex, power, and choice. The protagonist is a middle-aged divorced mother who is pursued by her professor. She is flattered by the attention, feels powerful, and thinks she is making her own choices in their relationship. In the end though, it becomes clear how little choice she actually had and that her agency and power were an illusion...[Continue Story]
Author’s Note: “Ribbon Room” not only chronicles a trip into the Iowa countryside to buy groceries, it is a record of a trip back in time for my inner child who is simultaneously in the fatherly care of myself. “I bought a bag/of licorice pipes from their candy counter,/a grown man thinking he was seven…[Continue Story]
Author’s note: “This poem began as a simple list playing with the idea that beachcombing can be a metaphor for living one’s life. But I love the ... [Continue Story]
Editor’s Note: Each word leads to the discovery of unexpected sweetness from the “loco” motion of a powerful love, left to our interpretation, unaffected and unbound from any sense of order. Writer’s Note: This poem is part of a series of love poems called “Something About the Way,” just out from Kelsay Publishers, first published… [Continue Story]
Author’s Note: “This might be a story about loss, about acceptance, or about grace. It all depends on the reader. Each person sees what they need to see in a story, or on a street.” Odd ... [Continue Story]
Author’s note: “The story of Tahlequah carrying her dead calf for 17 days rivets and shatters me. Anthropogenic factors including pollution and depletion of chinook salmon have put this group of whales on the Endangered Species list. Every birth is vital. Tahlequah’s calf lived just half an hour. Each time she surfaced to breathe, she ... [Continue Story]
Author’s Note: “After losing my mother to cancer when I was twelve years old, the cemetery where she is buried became a complicated place for me of expectation and mystery. When I became a mother ... [Continue Story]
Author’s Note: “While on sailing trip on the Chesapeake Bay, I became interested in nautical knots. Their use. Their names. Their configurations. The Anchor Hitch led me here.” A Knot That Holds Another husband to bury, and not yet 60. Sleepless, the dogs can’t settle down, whining in their crates, waiting for him to slip… [Continue Story]
Author’s Note: “Last March, writing a daily sonnet offered the structure to channel mounting anxiety fed by the news. The goal of five iambic feet per ... [Continue Story]
Author’s Note: I wrote this poem after attending a week-long silent meditation retreat at a place called Mt. Eden, at a time when I felt the way Eve might have felt after being kicked out of ... [Continue Story]
