My Mother’s Toenails
As her memory darkened, I did not see my mother. What hold time held upon my mother loosened and, like a shawl, slipped. My father worried that she would walk out the front door in her nightgown, with an empty black purse slung over her arm, into traffic she would not see, having forgotten her...
Humminbirds
My grandfather and I sit in the August sun, on the back porch of the house he built himself, watching ruby-throated hummingbirds hover like living jewels near the plastic feeder. The glass of molasses-sweet tea he poured weeps cold and wet in my hand. “Them humminbirds really do sing. Says they don’t in bird books,”...
Incident in the Lunch Buffet Line in Atlantic City
My father who faints at the sight of blood—his or anybody else’s—saved a life today. My father with his 80-year-old stiff arthritic joints, dropped to his knees seconds after the woman who had been standing in front of him in line for the lunch buffet in Atlantic City collapsed and lay ashen and not breathing...
Waiting
Today–my birthday–I have to admit: my body is looking older. A friend says you know you’re fifty when your mother’s hand slides out of your sweater. I brush my hair, but it doesn’t swing heavy like it did just a few years ago. I could handle the color damage by shaving it off to a...
Slide
The wrinkles on her elbow are like the circles in a tree stump, telling her age to anyone who knows the formula. I watched her from two seats behind on the bus. Her nostrils were big. I wanted to climb into one of them and get sucked up into her brain with a hard tugging...
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