Permanent Wave Mary, the cashierat Community Thrift Store,winks at me and slips the sweaterinto my bag for free. This stuff’s give us to anyway, she says. I smile, gratefully befuddled.Somewhere between acquaintance and strangeris the province of our relationship. Mary seems to think it’s more. I park and walk into Bert’s Vinyls,the used record shop […]

What can mangroves do when the clouds grumble and the sky short-circuits and starts spewing ragged sparks? Their arms are too heavy to cover their heads; their feet too bound by roots to run, they face the executioner’s black hood between jagged flashes of fright. No wonder their trunks are twisted, turning away. No wonder  […]

It’s the red lips,rouged cheeks,the curled black hairfalling on perfect neckand shoulders,long bare legsstraddling the chairin the boudoirthat makes me restmy chin on top my handswhich themselves are resting on the handle of my cane.There’s no ardent urge, no fervorfor a sexual encounter—I’m too old for that pleasure.My pleasure comeswith the simplicity of seeingsomething unlike […]

Woebegone is such a wonderful wordI should put it in a poembut the only bedraggled spectacle hereis made of spent sunflowers and deadblack-eyed-Susans. Woebegone makes methink of a woman, tall and lean, face morose,her slump a sign of obvious defeat, worriedyet resigned, surrounded by her children,like a Dorthea Lange photograph of a migrantmother on the […]

Woods That Cape Breton Doesn’t Know (after Elizabeth Bishop) Sunday morning. Once the bus rolls past Guymon, trailing a plume of blue-gray exhaust that follows along like a stray dog, there’s nothing—you’re inside the handle of the pan. Not a single white-clad steeple can be seen anywhere across this landscape. As you reach more nothing, […]