Hire the twelve year old from next door: Helen of Troy with azure eyes rimmed with black lashes. She loves kids, her mother says. She cuddles the two-year-old, Invites the five-year-old to build puzzles And ram cars against each other.…
Browsing: MER Online
I dream I walk through a desert of stone. It once took months for letters to reach their recipients; packages of supplies to pass foreign customers – worlds gone by. Bananas were posted to prevent scurvy and luck-charms embroidered slowly.…
An afternoon curling around us, not my house nor yours for tea– we sit in a borrowed mansion, the two grantees—one a painter trying to stop nomads from running. the other a writer talking about eyes, how they show what…
In the midst of slicing onions, the poet Receives a message from her Kitchen Witch In almost-iambic-pentameter. Anxiously she searches for paper and pencil Before the elusive language Falls away like the peel. While she scribbles a furious shorthand, A…
“Mommy!” “Don’t step in the paint!” “Mommy, look – look!” “Shhhh. I’m working.” …. right in the middle… Lost the line, color’s mud. “Alright, what?” Ow, too sharp! “Never mind.” “Whoa. OK. Where’s Margie, isn’t she taking care of you?…
Summer already and too hot, time for movement, blowing left or right even, if forward is too much to ask, hips shifting, knees flexed like basketball players, ankle-breakers, fast and then gone, a going somewhere, not just out, but an…
Seven years ago, we left our Upper West Side co-op for many reasons. My husband needed a driveway. My toddler deserved a bedroom with windows. I had to get out of the kitchen — that narrow room, where, cramped in…
A pen in hand works like bloodletting. Something in the gut. It’s the Voice of all voices asking to reign and leave my body behind, but I need more time. I trust other people when I want to believe they’re…
Our body is our beloved, and our destiny is found in our dreams: “Where are you?” asked Marjorie. “On a boat off the coast of The Big Island of Hawaii,” I answered as a dozen dolphins took flight into the…
When I come upstate in your third trimester, we take fetch-crazy Otis for a walk; the centimeter gained each week makes you the ball that O runs after. And I feel Ruby cause a quake along the equator of your…