for Leah Atwood The way you prepare a sheep for slaughter is to praise her, kiss her pointy face and tell her how grateful you have been to know her, weep while she eats the treat of oats you’ve offered her and then lead her to the pasture where the stun gun awaits....

When I was in my mid-teens and living in Queens, New York, there were two Donalds around, one I knew and the other I didn’t. Donald McKayle was my modern dance teacher and the other Donald was a kid who lived in our neighborhood and went to the same High School as my...

for Paul Andrews Over the years, all my writing has been focused on intuitive ways of knowing the world and I use poetic diction and stories to get my point across rather than rational facts. I figure it’s through subtlety – ‘feeling’ the way more than ‘thinking’...

I am sometimes taken to task for sending out these ‘positive’ messages while there is so much evil happening in the world.  “Don’t you see what’s going on?” they demand. Of course I see it - that’s why I try to remind myself, and us, of the opposite. This seems...

Moving house and home after so many years has been a big deal made even bigger by ‘shelter in place’ rules, since being able to do it with family and friends had to be scrapped. The work was mine to do alone, which meant clearing a 10-room house down to what could fit...

This morning I tried to figure out how to bring Russ’ alabaster sculpture, which has been on extended loan to us for the past 10 years, back to his house around the corner. But it’s very heavy - no way either Russ or I could carry it there. Maybe I can ask...

In an uncanny twist of fate I find myself in transition, packing up house and home of fifty years to move onto a farm community, just when the rest of the world is also in transition, this virus having put all of us in Stop mode for the time being. We do not know what...

The other night I had a nightmare of being covered with oily beetles in clumps all over my body. I could feel them crawl down my legs and up my chest, their pointy feet prickling my skin and their hard bodies clicking as they rubbed against one another. I woke up...

The other night Destiny Arts Center, as they could not perform their new show to an enthusiastic live audience, held an online Gala instead. But it was not so much a performance as a spirited conversation between all of them and us, their larger community; it was a...

My favorite exercise these days, during this time of quarantine, is going on walkabout in the neighborhood, all gloved and masked like a bandit with a basket of books on my arm destined for the Little Free Library kiosks on every other block. Much of my time at home...