I love the grocery list’s role in illuminating the narrator’s desires for luxury; but what are the roots of this underlying need? Is it a need for stability that her mother’s abandonment denied her?

Last night she saw the glow of the fire to the north, to the east. She heard the cries of her neighbors, their panicked voices, their cars starting and revving; she stayed low, peering out the window as their taillights were swallowed, consumed, and she was left alone. Now, an eerie silence lies over the bungalow court like a blanket, the sirens and whirlybirds and chainsaws far enough to be fantasy – dreams, perhaps. Because surely none of this can be real.

One might have a wingdream of love or of escape…

…someone stuck all their nasty lawn flags touting the narcissistic conspiracy fake news guy right next to the property line

on entering the second half of life

The Stone

The sky is the color of cement, and life is at a standstill…

I had enough common sense to recognize unchristian behavior when I saw it and enough theological training to understand the Fundamentalist flaws that drove it.

If you plant a word on a page,

does it begin to draw

a bit of light?

Arms balancing bags of soaked swimming gear, hair dryer, groceries, and dry cleaning, I stagger inside with snow blowing, boots covered, as ringing starts and I push hard against the wind to close the door.

I’d waited four months for the appointment. My hope for help had kept me moving the dead weight of my body from bed to shower to work each day. Each day I felt might be my last day. As empty as the room, I sat on the edge of the exam table. My head felt like a bowling ball. It was that heavy. I let it hang. 

These legs have carried me a long way, and must for a while longer.

Behind her, more translucent spirits float, as weightless as smoke in the breeze.

So the sky lives in me
but the dark?
I don't know where the dark lives.
It comes and goes.

The internet offers “oculus,” from antiquity. Named from the Latin for “eye,” this circular opening in the center of a dome or in a wall, none of which sounds right. If that is what this is.

It wasn’t to hear him speak/on piety and justice

my history–yes, I’m still hankering
after songs of money and love,
love and worry.

I could have lived without opening the car window if he didn’t smoke, but he did, and not just cigarettes but a pipe as well, and sometimes a cigar.  In our tight quarters, he managed to light a cigarette, place his pipe somewhere, and drive a stick shift.

The world went clanking like an old tin can,
a cranking babbler on its wind-whirled way,
tossed on immodestly, without restraint,
and little mercy from the tar it spanked;

Could have been worse, everyone said. / It wasn’t meant to be…