Deep in the city where the poor wait for the Second Coming suicide is uncommon. No one leaps off skyscrapers
He asked and so I told him. The “cancer” poems stem from cancer in the family. Daughter’s terminal. Son’s a five-year survivor.
Some things can’t be fixed any other way says Bill in his bedroom on the third floor hoping to get some sleep
Tea in the afternoon with his wife of many years is usually peaceful, Hubert thinks before he makes his announcement. Then he says it. “I’m going upstairs,” Hubert tells Ruth as he hois...
Tim Murnane was born to parents who lived in a small brick bungalow in a lower-middle class neighborhood in Chicago. His father worked as an electrician for Commonwealth Edison Company ...
They’ll be coming for us, the old lady told the young man next to her, the two of them sitting on stones under the bridge surrounded by trolls
Forty years Leroy was a doorman at a nice hotel in a big city. He was a country boy the day he got the job because he was tall and the uniform fit, the manager s…
In your mind you hear words snarling all day long but no poem arrives. The words are locked
Tonight I can’t sleep so I ponder the universe and all the planets around me swirling in syncopation with me on one of them
Evil without we worry about but not so much evil within, parent to evil without. Evil within, once called sin,
When Bernie wakes at 6 a.m. there’s a piano on his chest and Erroll Garner’s playing “Mist… Sinatra’s on the headboard improvising lyrics
Neighbors were happy to see Fred and Opal come back for the annual block party. Old Bill asked Fred why they moved and Fred said
The tale’s a parable and it scares Bill more than any creepy clown hiding behind a tree
That’s a very big tree and a boy scout could climb it with all the right gear. But it’s a condominium, too. You would disturb families.
I turn the porch light on because it’s dark when I go out to find the morning paper. It’s still dark when I start back but when I’m on the porch I reach