Salt and Pepper White privilege it’s called and recently I learned its name although I’ve been white as a sheet for decades. Like breathing and eating I take white privilege for granted. I push a cart through a megastore in bib overalls and no one follows me and when I hail a cab in a snow storm, it picks me up. My freckles may be a stop sign. Not so […]
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Willie in his 80s now hadn’t made sense in years. His wife understood his grunts from the recliner where she propped him up till bedtime where snoring was music in the night. His grandson told neighbors Gramps had Old-Timer’s Disease, an excellent diagnosis with which doctors agreed. It was time to move Gramps to a home so his wife began […]
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Freckles They Called Him Walter Branham, a retired teacher, and his wife Victoria went to Applebee’s, the chain restaurant, for lunch one day last week. First time they had gone there. Usually they go to an ethnic restaurant but Victoria wanted a salad. Walt as always was obliging. The restaurant host was a young man who as a […]
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Age Has Curtains An incident in youth never meant to happen recorded on a pad to be read another time is found decades later in a drawer of socks by the writer who is then on the precipice of age. His reading glasses help him understand who it was and why he did it. Not so funny now. Can’t apologize. He’s […]
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The Widow Next Door Every Saturday when the sun is out and it’s hotter than Hades Monica next door raises her garage door early in the morning and leaves it up long past noon as if Herm will walk out at any minute oily and greasy needing to clean up the way he used to every Saturday […]
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An Act of the Will If love’s real, not the puppy kind, it’s not just a feeling but an act of the will a constant giving whether one feels like it or not. After many years you don’t know why you’re doing it or why It must be done. Two begin as grapes purple with passion unaware you’ll be raisins wrinkling at the end.
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The following is a collection of poems about Vietnam veterans and how their lives were forever changed by the horrific effects of the herbicidal warfare compound known as Agent Orange. A Life Without Guard Rails You think you got problems? You probably do but would you trade with Phillip, a Vietnam vet who still thinks Agent Orange lurks in every puddle […]
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A Puzzling Marriage Married 60 years Fred and Daisy still are very different people. All day long they hide their differences to make their marriage last but every night after supper they let them out silently. Fred in his recliner works a crossword puzzle while Daisy in the dining room works a jigsaw puzzle but neither Fred nor Daisy speaks a word until one has finished and howls […]
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I bring a milkshake every other week to an old man in a nursing home, a refugee from Germany who paid me 50 cents to cut his grass when I was a kid in Chicago after WWII. I couldn’t understand him then and I can’t understand him now but 50 cents was big money in 1950, 10 candy bars, 10 […]
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I died from a rattlesnake bite and found myself in line with other zombies in front of a bank of elevators, the doors opening and closing as if by metronome. Every time a door opened a voice called the names of 12 zombies who boarded the elevator single file. As the doors closed, Led Zeppelin or Bing Crosby played in the background depending on whether the […]
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