Pot Pies. Waffles with Jam.

She never quite understood her name, while she secretly loved its sound.

Speculated our mother had a dream in which the syllables fell from a basket

in a scrabble to compose the odd, monkey moniker that stuck. Only sister

joined by blood, first friend or pest, and sharer of stories, witness to bats

swooping night's swimming pool. Always there. With her

loose baby teeth,

grinning. Hair akimbo as I tugged and tucked my cowlicks

under hard, spiky headbands. Trick or treat tag-along,

sucking on Sweet Tarts,

three TV shows minimum in the afternoon

as dusk sunk Dark Shadows. Gilligan's Island.

Bewitched.

Pot pies for dinner or sometimes even the coveted poor girls'

waffles, soft, with red, seed-pitted jam.

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Shameless Early Promotion

My poetry book, The Fiction of Stillness, is available for pre-order now on Barnes and Noble. Official release date August 1st, 2024. Here's a taste: ... The table is smooth and round symmetric The chairs are haphazardly placed at the end of this day I have breast cancer I say into the receiver [communities must] pool resources How to produce the sounds of the imaging report into sentences that resonate with months of postponement weighty contrast on my right side computing and comparing IM ratios for greater insight not sufficient to prove the efficacy of screening ...

Vessel

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Open Mic, Cafe Babar

I remember arriving, not the prettiest but appealing to certain bards in the back room, entering through the Castro Valley corner door, walking the postage stamp sized Cinzano bar curated by a man from Detroit who named his establishment after a certain French elephant in a children’s book I arrive with budding consciousness around politically correct solidarity for disheveled neighbors, entering the cigarette lit night rising to tin siding ceiling to floor thumping insistence Bruce and Joie and David and Laura and John, their ash and sweat accumulating as I waited patiently for my place on the crumpled sign-up sheet Today, three decades later, I sit in a Santa Fe gallery named simply Here, and a poet reads to us of roadrunners and a bear and a continuation of the call for preservation of our environment There is an otherworldly hum outside the window of leaded glass The owner sidles up behind me and pushes the fr...

As Mourning Doves Persist

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