The Georgia Review
April 1999
Short Story
Thank you for the fine story in The Georgia Review. Congratulations: it is deft, witty, and packs a great deal of punch.
--- William Styron
What a funny, sad, compelling, clear, and wonderful read!
--- Laure-Anne Bosselaar
Confrontation
Summer 1999
Short Story
Opening sentence: Cletus Anderson was in the garden tending the butterbeans when he looked up and realized there was no power on heaven and earth that could make him walk back into that kitchen.
Ploughshares
Spring 2005
Drum
He lunged for the shut-off switch when he heard the scream.
But the brutal five-inch teeth on the rotating drum,
designed to excavate the coal face, had already destroyed
helmet and hair, scalp and brain. Its rotation
diminishing now, the carbide-tipped cutter bits
dripping with the miner's mistake. The noise declining
as the massive drum, about six feet long, rolled
to a stop and fell silent. The machine's remaining motors
droning dirges now. This coal seam had a name,
the coal mine, too, and even the continuous miner,
run by remote controls hung from the neck,
was identified with engraved letters on its scarred metal skin.
But this other name they knew they'd never say again
as casually as they'd done only moments before.
No one wanted to aim his headlamp there.
No one wanted to speak his name out loud.
He shouldn't have been there. It shouldn't have happened.
The rest of the section turned as one to the foreman
who approached the shadowed cavity deep in the coal face,
bowing his head to bring his light to the edge
slowly, the beam casting severe shadows
on the black ridges of coal, alien as rocks
lit by stark sunlight on the surface of the moon,
seen from the window of a passing capsule.
A very strong piece of writing, full of the right words and of felicities like "The machine's other motors/droning dirges now." What the foreman's headlamp sees is very vivid.
--- Richard Wilbur
North American Review
March 2007
Bats at Twilight
Shouldering shadow, the mid-October sky
loses its religion,
turning trees in stained-glass colors
gray as stone.
The sun slips out the back,
late for a party out of town;
my friend at the front door buttons up his coat
before saying goodbye.
Passing over the ashes of this congregation,
silhouettes of wings
prompt me to remark about birds flying south,
but my friend (following our history
of amiable contradiction) says no, they're bats.
Gloom tucks in the corners of the groomed lawns,
as these dark acolytes,
darting about in the dying light,
set up their acoustic Eucharist,
and long after my friend has disappeared
into the charcoal neighborhood,
I stand in my dim doorway watching
the eerie masquerade that dusk offers
these naked wings.
Confrontation
Spring/Summer 2008
Code
even without the illicit slurp
of quill into inkwell
the long blue-black trail across virginal vellum
even without oriental figures
brushing the skin of parchment
lingering innuendo into every serif and curve
even without the eloquence
of a renaissance mind
trained to translate foreign sighs
even now, with only a scroll
no hand can touch
behind that wall of glass
even reduced to this
I can declare my desire
with nothing more
than the letters of your name
Crab Orchard Review
Winter/Spring 2008
Pine
the Abe Lincoln of trees:
tall, skinny, homely,
with a dark craggy bark
and if coins featured trees,
instead of people, a pine
feels appropriate for the penny
(saving the oak or elm, say,
to adorn the quarter, the sequoia
for the silver dollar)
this Lincoln comparison's not perfect: pine never
saved the union, and only cicadas
might consider it a great emancipator,
crawling up the crevices in the trunk
to unzip their backs and fly away
leaving the gawky pines standing in the yard
holding outgrown clothes,
turpentine running down like tears
in the late summer sun, sticking
to everything that touches it
I remember watching pines
through a window one October,
only three years old, during Hurricane Hazel:
they bent so far over in the horrifying wind
many of them snapped and crashed
and the tree became my personal totem
of uncontrollable danger
until I grew up and saw them differently
especially this morning as I recall the way
my children, long before they left for college,
used pine park as chalk
to draw all over the sidewalk
making pictures in sepia tones
Atlanta Review
Fall/Winter 2006
Object Lesson with Apples
She'd been a pre-school teacher once
and learned the secrets of apples.
Picking up a knife
and reaching for the fruit bowl in her kitchen,
she offered me an exhibition:
there is a star if you slice it sideways.
The number of seeds isn't random:
there are always five,
radiating from the apple's heart,
a little star, an asterisk to mark
what's been missing all the other times
my lips have been drawn to the glistening
red, how many I've held without knowing
what really lies at the core.
It was the hour of whispers.
Would she show me more,
something else I've never known before?
North American Review
May-August 2008
The Word for Smoke
I rang my neighbor's doorbell, very young,
very early one morning, before I'd learned
very many words. But I had figured out
that what I saw escaping from her chimney
connected with a fire in her hearth. And I
was curious about the way that flames
might curl around a log. I wanted to hear
the snap and roar and hiss of its speech,
despite the limitations of my own.
My neighbor's normal habits of attire
were vigorously neat, with every hair
in place, and what she wore just so.
But on this one occasion, she appeared
in ragged robe and slippers, hair in curlers:
I nearly ran away but was resolved
to see the blaze that filled her flue with what?
The word had drifted out of reach as I
addressed myself to her unhappy face,
and the only words that came to mind
were fire and roof. She looked alarmed
and rushed outside (though hardly dressed
for passersby), and nothing on
the roof besides a chimney venting smoke.
I kept repeating fire! fire!
as if this could persuade her,
but she told me to go back home
and firmly closed the door.
I think it started then---before I'd even started school:
this appetite of mine for language,
for finding the right word,
so that, whenever curiosity carried me
to other thresholds, I might gain admission.
because I knew the password.
