In Jacksonville, North Carolina, my brother was eight years old, In a department store, on tip toes, he was trying to get a drink. “Boy! Don’t drink from that! That’s the colored folk’s fountain! Can’t you read? It’s plain to see. Use the white people’s fountain.” Bewildered, he looked around for Mom who fearlessly stepped up: […]
Category: Poetry Readings at Washington State Libraries
Raw Story
I know you didn’t see the calico under the feed all claws and teeth spring up four feet to take down a sparrow but that’s the unembellished truth more essential than NBC news.
Anamnesis
A recollection of rain in green fingertips tulip bulbs testing the air nudging tiny conical hills in flowerbeds, the swollen creek surges into the last steelhead run the rising Umpqua remembering spring. I cannot attest the season as anamnesis, that begs an old question does the earth have a soul? Let’s say, for our sake, it […]
Eagle Bowl
In warm air I grow, a weed in a dry field by a stadium nothing much sprouts where I am I suck up all the water where only a lizard may live, in spring a few wildflowers may color the space summer consumes in high heat The soil so rocky not worth a worm’s ass […]