by Susanna Hargreaves Do my heartfelt words matter and will my children even remember the sound of my voice Will they think of me when they hear the faint keys of a piano or when they smell blueberry muffins baking and when they see the pile of books next to…
by Chris Boucher My pet beagle is expanding my world. One day she sniffs out rabbit pellets behind the house. Another day it’s a freshly-dug hole under the shed – my neighbor says a hedgehog did it. On yet another, she returns proudly with a deer antler in her mouth….
by Holly Day I watched him float away like a single tuft of dandelion fluff out of my arms and out of the house and into his own life and then the door closed and I was alone. There was not one moment in the past twenty years that I…
by Rosemary Dunn Moeller Along Nantucket Sound at Dennisport where Swan River runs out into the sea, I watch buffleheads, far out from shore, who don’t know we’re cold today, the middle of winter, wind chill factor too low to watch for long. Sunshine’s brightest this afternoon when I step…
by John P. Kristofco …when we add up all the numbers, shut the lights, shutter the concession stands, set behind like years, people who have come and gone, seasons we’ve forgotten though once they stirred our hearts, quiet now like baselines, bleachers, segments of our souls subtracted, risen up like…
by David Armand Every weekend my father sat on the sofa all day watching movies like Lethal Weapon, Platoon, Lonesome Dove, Tombstone, and all five Rockys back-to-back. His favorite one was The Abyss with Ed Harris and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio and sometimes he’d watch it— rewind the tape he’d rented…
by Amy Covel I’m not here To be a hero Just a world-shaker Here to erupt As a volcano A ticking time bomb Whose time is up Remembered only For that one sudden Explosion.
by David Armand My brother and I are playing outside while our dad nails together the frame for a rabbit cage. It’s for our sister who’s out at the store with Mom. They’ve taken the only car we have: a blue Pinto we rent for sixty dollars a week, a…
by John P. Kristofco in autumn clouds above the church, twenty, maybe thirty geese align like praying hands, aimed at something promised by the wisdom of their hollow bones, agate eyes acknowledging the sun; they sweep above our sanctuaries, sidewalks, all the places where we leave our lives behind, in…
by Gil Hoy When you’re a bottle 29 years go by fast, Not necessarily so for a little girl. Through Hurricane Hugo The whipping winds The crashing rain The stones that missed You, you survived intact to tell the tale of an 8 year old girl who walked along the…