Winter 2014

The Big Chair

Joanne stood by her car in the parking lot of Blue Hills Nursing Home and filled her lungs with cold October air. She’d spent the last hour sweet-talking her mother into eating tiny spoonfuls of mashed potatoes and gravy, waxy green beans, and stringy chicken. She took another deep breath…

The Creek

My brother barefoot in its grey thread, in his hands the small fish hooked out, fluttering like a loose paint chip. A jar of crawdads to carry home sat on the bank. We’d watch them for a day until the tiny albino shapes would hang shiftless in the water like…

Translation

for Loyal Jones So I came out of my rainy bower covered with white petals dropped from a tree. My people long ago whose milky eyes I still can see would have said I had a God’s plenty of petals on me, an expression I liked to hear as a…