Blog : Beautiful-Things
Kinetic Energy
| April 24, 2017 Weeks after California first legalized queer marriages but before the voters snatched them away in 2008, my girlfriend introduced me to the dyke march...
Saturday Night
| April 17, 2017 Every day I flash on scenes and sounds of Fallujah. There are ways of grounding them...
Kerria
| April 10, 2017 “Cheerful!” she said, “What is it?” Then recognizing the compact rows of marigold trophies lining spray upon spray arcing over the yard, “Oh, kerria, that was my mother’s favorite.” A moment of silence for one mother’s mother gone twenty years...
Bottled Memories
| April 3, 2017 Golden jars glisten. Forty-nine quarts of autumn ripeness and summer’s bronze made sweet by the kiss of blizzards to come. Like a mother waiting for the reassuring cry of her newborn, I pine for the pop of jars sealing...
A Dress for the Wedding
| March 27, 2017 You are modeling dresses and your husband votes for the one with the bouncy hem and V-neck. "It shows your nice cleavage!" "Yeah, for everyone." But in fact, you like your cleavage, and it's good to like something about your body...
The Boarding School Letters
| March 20, 2017 But consider for example the six-year-old daughter, face down on her new dorm bed, who cannot possibly imagine what to write to her mother a thousand miles away...
Holding Hands
| March 6, 2017 We walk up the stairway of my grandmother's porch. Towers of brick flank the stairs, which later we will scramble up to leap into the soft green grass below...
Dead Man Tim
| February 27, 2017 Tim's apartment was cleaned and all his belongings put out on a curb in the parking lot. This is the saddest part...
Yes, They've Met
| February 20, 2017 There's a 1/16 scale Texaco truck parked on our mantle, its frame crooked and stack bent from ways it's been stored. I dust it. Then, I dust my son's toolbox, an eighth-grade shop project etched with the name he's inherited from good stock. My husband's grandfather drove a Texaco truck...
Ice
| February 13, 2017 I'm nine months pregnant with my first child, and the snow in NYC has been beaten into submission. I've just come off a packed subway...
Seattle, After the Rain
| February 6, 2017 To the birds, we must look like ants at a picnic, the way we crawl from our dark caves and run crazed for sidewalks and grassy parks...
This is Where You'll Find Me
| January 30, 2017 New York City, after we lied then made rules. It shouldn't work by a long shot but it does....
Lines of Light
| January 23, 2017 At sunset in Burlington the power lines are golden like the afterglow of sparklers when children twirl them in the air. A frayed ribbon of sunlight stretches out...
What We Did with the Honey
| January 16, 2017 The day we learned you were gone, Howie says he knocked, nothing answered.
Parabolic
| January 9, 2017 His first summer married, my father tended chickens. His job was to chase the birds out of the tin coop on hot days...
Morning (repeat)
| January 2, 2017 When my infant daughter wakes at two in the morning and her father cannot coax her back to sleep...
The Day to Day
| January 1, 2017 Sifting the flour. Squeezing the lever once. And then waiting. For a moment, it is winter again. I take my finger and make snow angels in the little blue bowl. After you died, they said the only thing to do was keep on living...
The Day to Day
| January 1, 2017 Sifting the flour. Squeezing the lever once. And then waiting. For a moment, it is winter again. I take my finger and make snow angels in the little blue bowl.Â
White (repeat)
| December 26, 2016 We no longer remember the sound of birdsong or the feel of dry pavement beneath our feet, but we walk to school anyway because school is the place we're meant to walk to on Tuesday mornings. Temperatures register -23 below zero...
Grace (repeat)
| December 19, 2016 "Thank you," I tell the manager, "for taking my order so late." The sizzle of the grill frames my words. "I appreciate it."
Holding (repeat)
| December 12, 2016 My sister and I live on either side of sixty. We've been mothers half our lives. Visiting her in Oregon, Ashland running a steady hundred degrees for days into weeks, we head to Lake of the Woods...
Turkey Soup (repeat)
| December 5, 2016 On Thanksgiving, after the turkey is carved and gutted - after we slice through half of the twenty-pound bird my mother insists on ordering...
Birthday Cards
| November 28, 2016 Once, I wrote a birthday poem for her forty-second. It described her love of wine, and how she was so very fine. Exceedingly satisfied at the neat rhyme and my infinite untapped potential, I awaited glowing praise...
An Absence of Yellow
| November 21, 2016 It's mid-August and already my grandfather's pumpkins boast a bright orange. His cucumbers have laced thin vines up the patio rail. The tomatoes flush cherry-red in waves. My grandparents bribe me with vegetables to come for a visit...
Claudia
| November 14, 2016 She was only 15 and already had lost a leg to bone cancer. Our high school girls' Sunday school class had pondered this for a few weeks...
In the Fold
| November 7, 2016 She wields a basket of clean linen with easy confidence: one, two moves across the chest to make a towel into thirds...
Only Now
| October 31, 2016 Only now, as you stand center of an aisle carpeted royal blue, where you and your older sisters, styled by mother in hand-sewn dresses to match her own, once trailed like ducks down the narrow river...
Bike Ride
| October 24, 2016 I don't remember if I wrapped my hands around my father when he let me ride on the back of his yellow Schwinn....
Red Birds
| October 17, 2016 I hand the plate of raw vegetables to Dad. He sets it on the shelf attached to the grill, settles his arm around me. Pointing to the tree above, he says, "See those red birds?"
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beautiful things (158)
bike ride (1)
birthday cards (1)
grace (2)
holding (2)
in the fold (1)
jack bedell (1)
julia shipley (1)
lines of light (1)
morning (1)
only now (1)
parabolic (1)
red birds (1)
turkey soup (2)
white (2)
