Image: Tony Alter – Flickr: Little Beauties (Orange Jewelweed – Impatiens Capensis), CC BY 2.0
Impatiens
Quarantine Academy—Dear Lovely Students:
A mash up of 90-plus letters to my students in emails and a daily blog during COVID-19 school closures Well, this is it, it is Tuesday, and we are not going to school. This is the first day. Surreal headlines and government announcements. Puzzles selling out, as everyone hunkers down. I’ve been reading cancelation policies. My friend is walking his goats. The white pygmy’s name…
Two Poems
Fences We built fences along the spine of the Blue Ridge, bore through the shale deposits like a fist invading the sovereignty of someone’s nose. We sweated through our heat-faded shirts, turned tawny and blistered in the sun, swung hammers the way I imagine the first ape to wield a limb felt just before it struck some other lumbering biped who up until then had…
Three Poems
Ice Caves I can’t hike the Cascades without thinking the worst, be it rockslide or heatstroke, or cougar springing out of the ferns and devil’s club. Day of fun ruined. My dad carries a Glock on his hip to make him feel safe but I know it’ll be the asthma that gets him. Or crashing blood sugar. Or bad knees. At the end of a…
Two Poems
This Strange Continent Let’s write of our grandmothers. Mamaw always made biscuits. Her rings hung around her thin fingers like a rattle. With these hands that drove a munitions truck during the war, that beat her children, that hurled trash at Black children at the carnival in Northern Louisiana in the 1930s when they tried to enjoy it. Let’s write of our grandmothers and say…