Category: Uncategorized

  The smell of pulp, turpentine, and bleach usually permeates this side of town. But when winds from the southeast swoop into the valley, the toxic brew is fast cleared away, and what remains is the smell of wet grasses, mud, and wildflowers. This natural phenomenon mitigating human-made conditions has only a limited effect on…

  But when we tottered into the dawn light for our morning constitutional, Old Town Hero was back. We stood there, hands on our hips, scanning up and down the empty block for deadbeats and thugs. How anybody managed such an act of violence on our watch escaped us since we surveilled the neighborhood around…

  When, by some fluke set of circumstances, I won the student body presidency in eighth grade, all I could think about was Allende. Salvador Allende in Chile. Remember? I liked the business-suit socialists best. Fidel and Che were great, but the business-suit socialists made me feel like a man could be methodical and routine…

  Another lizard died. The second one this morning. Bobby’s father felt bad for the first family. The little girl took the lizard out of her small purse and showed it to us as though she had just committed a crime, as though we’d be the ones to hand down her punishment. Bobby’s father took…

  It’s late August. Our son is four years old. He’s at the side of the house, out of our sight. He can survive, even thrive, without us looking at him every second. Or we can at least try it out anyway.    My husband and I are on the front porch looking at my…

  This music has my hips bumming tangos off the sink. I should paint with yellow or anything that grabs a laugh. Own a crazed shanty on the end of a wharf. All baubled with glass floats and starfish freckles. Stacks of lobster traps and fork twirls of nautical rope. You can’t find the entrance…

  There was a field of sunflowers at this park I used to frequent. I say a field because that’s what it felt like, but really it was more of a patch. A yellow fifty-yard dash through the green Bermuda grass which was itself perforated with dainty three-prong shoots. Chunky dragonflies with translucent wings hovered…

American Pastoral by John Sibley Williams Again, the wind sings the laundry from the line.  Bleached of our stains, baptized by soap & sun,    by a once mighty river gone arroyo & a handed-  down washboard bartered for a grandmother’s   dreams, what we’ve worn to keep the world  from our bodies eddies out…

They Buried Him In The Sand             For John Henry the man and all the unnamed men buried at the Great Bend Tunnel, Talcott, West Virginia   Ghosts graze the land, and the grass— it tumbles off the lip into that old roadside tangle barbed wire kudzu caution tape soft sinkhole muck…

  whisper & smoke by henry 7. reneau, jr after “The Urban Wild Coyote Project” by Mandy-Suzanne Wong   old man coyote   //   demigod/shape-  shifter   /  dons a missionary’s collar/   & snakeskin boots//    cocks his head/   a God engine of whisper  & smoke   //   a politician’s wink &…