Every once in awhile over the last 40 years Ralph wondered what might have happened to the guy who had moved in with the mother

He asked and so I told him. The “cancer” poems stem from cancer in the family. Daughter’s terminal. Son’s a five-year survivor.

Something’s still bright when a widow dies and her son flies in gives her body to science has the movers

He doesn’t have to prove anything to me. The Holy Spirit, that is. I’ve always known He’s there, from childhood on, even if I ignored Him for many years. But like others growing older, ...

I’m on my way to Larry’s Place, a food pantry in the city. I park a block away because parking in front of Larry’s isn’t wise even if one drives

Should she write about the wonders of nature and say it’s okay to lie on the beach forever without any sunscreen

The guillotine dropped between you and a friend over coffee and small talk. The first time it dropped it was someone who said

Used to be she’d tell him what to get at the grocery store and he always brought it back. Now she makes a list.

Someday you’ll be in bed dying like I am now and people you love and some you don’t will come by to say good-bye. They don’t know what to say because we’re all amat…

He doesn’t understand distressed j… Designer jeans with rents and tear… look like the rags he grew up in wearing other people’s discards. His mother got his jeans from a ch…

The haberdasher has that season of the year he rids his racks, his bins of oddments. I have no season of the year

It was an ancient city. All the young people left as soon as they could but the old remained in their mortgaged huts

When Bill was a lad his parents preached that Scripture was the truth. Decades later now Bill still believes that.

She walks the rack of bright frock… as her husband, an Angus aging, paws at the carpet behind her. She wants the right dress to make verdant again the hills

Ringing in the ears has no cure. It’s called tinnitus and you can pronounce it the way it looks or the way