It’s outpatient surgery and she’s running late trying to catch a spider in the kitchen sink. Wants to carry it outside

The editor of the school paper came at the appointed hour and found the old poet in his backyard alert in a lawn chair with a

Melanie cried for hours the day a drunk driver ran over her dog a week after she had an abortion. She loved that dog so much she told her mother she knew

“Damn the vernal equinox! Full speed ahead!” is all that Cootie Murphy would ever say when he sat on the last stool at the end of the bar in The Stag & Doe Inn. He wouldn’t say it very ...

I have a friend, old and retired, who keeps busy helping the poor. Let’s call him Ted because he wants to remain anonymous. Some of his ideas, he says, wouldn’t make many of his neighbo...

My parents were far from preachy. They went to church separately and I went to the children’s service

When I was in grammar school I knew it was Wednesday when I looked out the window and saw across the street three trash cans at the curb

A small city on the outskirts of St. Louis has ordered Alice Hezel to pull the swamp milkweed out of her yard because the city says it’s a weed and weeds aren’t allowed in Maplewood, Mi...

After all the tests and the doctor’s explanation she thinks of them not as 20 points of cancer but as 20 rusty nails

In St. Louis young blacks carry guns like cell phones and use them often to shoot each other, as we read in the daily paper

Outside, the still of crickets. Inside, petals of a cold sore foliate,

In a yard abandoned this winter when the owner moved grass is growing this spring

A long time ago you bothered him somehow. Since then he has bothered you back. You don’t know how or

If love’s real, not the puppy kind, it’s not just a feeling but an act of the will a constant giving

The amount in every paycheck has a period in it. Those who get a paycheck every week dream about seeing a comma three spaces in front of the perio…