When light shines, or maybe glares.



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When the Song, Not Just the Groundhog, Got Cooked   Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back. Robert Frost, “The Road Not Taken.” So it goes. Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five. (Stock photo. For illustration purposes only.)      On a tangible hillside in honest-to-goodness hilly Pittsburgh, actual man is robbed of his bush berries in broad unfiltered daylight. Culprit is furry, breathing. Actual man clobbers culprit and cooks culprit’s wet pink meat. Actual man makes quiche, perceptible steam puffing out. Man carries dish to party, yum yum. True story gets around. Man’s breathing sister in fields-and-cows Virginia tells some other breathing people. One says, her thoughts coming hot on the air, “That sounds like a country song: Kill a groundhog and put it in a quiche. Tell him to write a song.” Breathing sister does. Actual man does. Man jiggers words around in his pulpy brain and sends them to his machine, making it blink but no...
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Monarch Sighting, No Kings Day I wanted to cry. Stretched ahead and behind along the street, the bobbing line of us. Those at the fore, crossing at the stoplight where police stood guard. Those at the rear, not caught up yet, strung across a bridge into the unseeable distance. The joy, because we were many. Past the entrance to the rally grounds, past the clotheslines holding blue butterflies, the crowd milling. Butterflies and butterflies, hundreds pinned on. Each a somebody snitched from here, snared, shunted to some hell. Soon the time for speeches, songs. Loud and loud. On a grass patch not teeming with bodies, a woman opening her wings, floating them up into the blue. Spreading, enveloping, spreading, enveloping. The child so wrapped and held would know only safety. Would for that bliss.    
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Where do Trumpies go when they die? It’s a question. One I knew is in a box now, in crumbs, covered over with plain graveyard dirt. The stone doesn’t say Here Lies a Man Who Voted for Bully. But it’s true. He grinned—this was maybe 2016—when Bully’s name came up at the dinner table, and I snapped, “Don’t you ever laugh about him again.” Something like that—I forget what, exactly. It wiped the smile right off his face. But not for long. Then, that a proud pussy grabber could be running for president was what dominated the headlines. We weren’t talking pardons for insurrectionists, techie DOGE boys accessing government information (old news, yes yes), a police-run society . Obviously, nobody burned to a powder can ever again cast a ballot in favor of a lecherous narcissist, but voting as the man reduced to crumbs did, twice, is now his spiritual legacy. Tuesday, Heather Cox Richardson posted this: “While the Senate considered the [Big Beautiful Bill] today, President Donald J. Trum...
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When the Parents Fluttered Away   Brother Touslyhead takes the bigger bed upstairs, where I can read to him from the purple chair. Sister Ringlets and her math and p syc h  textbooks, the one across the hall. Sister Braids gets my husband’s and mine downstairs, right around the corner from the living room. So where does that leave us?   It’s all right. I love it on the sofa. It’s where I take up camp whenever I’m fevered and hacking, or too riled by the manic dead-of-night thoughts to sleep. This time, both of us chased from our bed, we’re elaborately stocked with pillows, blankets, and all, and from my berth I can still hear his breathing inches away, his toasty warm stirring, down on the floor. He’s even put his clock like he likes it, approximate to his bedding, the numerals lasering a path to his eyes.  For four whole nights the arrangement works just fine. Grandparents are  adaptable , right? They can handle things, right? There’s extra laundr...
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