SPOTLIGHT -
Turtle
"Who would be a turtle who could help it?"
"Autumn Faces"
"The season pivots and bends to the darkening north..."
Mrs. Butterworth, Uncle Ben & Aunt Jemima
"The headlines said Well-Loved American Foods Resisted Arrest, Failed to Comply, and Were Delicious While Black."
"Nursing Home Doctors"
"I say Good Morning! and he studies me in my white coat, like skin lesion he has seen only once in a textbook."
The Nation
"The national day had dawned."
After Apple Picking
"I am overtired, Of the great harvest I myself desired."
"Einstein’s Happiest Moment"
"...a falling man falling beside a falling apple could also be described as an apple and a man at rest..."
Owls
"I imagine an ossuary blooming in my gut, a stone well of tiny bones, ancestors tunneling through the cartilage, though of course I know this is impossible: ancestors are supposed to stay dead."
Hurried Prayer to My Chainsaw
"...I swear to not be in a half-assed rush, wear helmet & ear guards, keep my gloves on for even a fast cut..."
Senryu
Goes to the market Just to hear another voice: “Paper or plastic?”
Belief in Magic
"A single gem has throbbed in my chest my whole life, even though, even though this is my second heart..."
Ficus Lyrata...
"One September morning, the day I started medical school, I placed a two-foot specimen in my sunny south window."
"Poetry"
"Poetry arrived in search of me."
California
"That’s when I started dreaming I could be a doctor someday, that I could get away, prescribe myself a new life."
A Blessing
"But before offering it to us over steamed rice, even before his gods, he’d serve those who were not home..."
How It Will End
"We sit on a bench to find out how it will end..."
Treating Paul Celan
"While considering Celan's suicide, I think back to Virginia Woolf drowning herself..."
So This Is Nebraska
"So this is Nebraska. A Sunday afternoon; July. Driving along with your hand out squeezing the air, a meadowlark waiting on every post."
Wild
"The year I owned a motorcycle and split the air in southern Spain, and could smell the oranges in the orange groves as I passed them outside of Seville, I understood I'd been riding too long in cars..."
Love Song
"My own dear love, he is all my world,—And I wish I’d never met him."
How I Started to Use a Cane
"I was talking on the phone, walking steadier, noticed the tap, and after, the tap-step, a light knock, a knock like someone’s at the door come to visit..."
"The Scientists"
"...the beauty still intoxicating, the spirit of the research like a child swimming for the first time in the sea, awed..."
Naïve
"Remember? Remember wanting to play every minute, as if that was why we were born?"
Black Momma Math
"How free is our will if our fate is decided by our melanin. What is the meaning of Black lives when so many people don’t think we matter?"
Questions About Angels
"Of all the questions you might want to ask about angels, the only one you ever hear is how many can dance on the head of a pin..."
"A Psychiatrist’s Guitar"
"...when skilled hands and callused fingertips pick sweet equations where practice becomes song."
Spring View
"Touched by the hard times, flowers shed tears. Grieved by separations, birds are startled in their hearts."
Anthem for Doomed Youth
"Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes, Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes."
Eat
"The night is swallowing Daylight. We sit down to eat."
The Passionate Shepherd to His Love
"The shepherds' swains shall dance and sing, For thy delight each May morning. If these delights thy mind may move, Then live with me and be my Love."