I am not a criminal I am ducking my responsibility Before it comes To telling my grandchildren (For I shall have none) That I am the one who did these things;   I am the one who choked the sea With plastic, wrapped conveniently Around everything I could ever need (And some things I didn’t) To keep them sanitary, clean Never mind the lungs and eyes The breaking hearts of those unseen, Never mind the damaged soil Pits of poison, smoke’s toxic roil, Death dripping from the very pores Of those I never knew, never heard of before. It was me.   I am the one who chained the men The women, and the children when I bought the things which owned their lives Paid their captors, swallowed the lies, Ignored the truths I didn’t…

Continue reading →

Haeleigh was an angry flannel sheet. Until The March of Linen, she fussed and fumed, shedding copious amounts of lint and feigning an inability to have neatly matching corners. As per hospital squares, forget it. Such precision wasn’t going to happen as long as the laundry service repeatedly overstarched her. That company was cheap. It didn’t steam clothes, but washed them in tepid water. Plus, rather than apply industrial soap, that business used questionable surfactant compounds purchased through Third World middlemen. To boot, that service, which reprehensibly ran mixed loads of darks and lights, caused Haeleigh and many of her kin to become splotched with pink or grey. Additionally, that slipshod cleaner batched together orders from multiple clients, thereby sending some of Haeleigh’s nearest and dearest to foreign addresses. It was rumored that Haeleigh’s brother,…

Continue reading →

Breaking the Silence A boy cowers in the corner as his mother raises a belt high into the air. A girl clings to her teddy bear as Daddy enters her room in the middle of the night. A woman fights for her life as a stranger drags her into a vacant alley. So many voices Silent. One voice pierces the darkness, coaxes courage. A second voice emerges from the shadows then another then another… An angry choir swells: No longer will we remain silent. No longer will we hide in secrecy, shame, and fear. Tonight is the night we shout  NO MORE! NO MORE!     Hypervigilance She surfs the edge of dreams dares not sleep too deep the Bogeyman lurks in every shadow eager to tear flesh from bone. Snap of twig outside the…

Continue reading →

Who says reading is an activity limited to your couch and a cup of tea? Over spring break, I had the chance to travel around to the homes, museums, and fictional locations of authors whose works I have been reading in my Italian literature course. My class teamed up with a Latin class to travel to Sicily, Italy. Over the course of ten days, we toured around the island, visiting ancient sites as well as literary sites related to the 20th century Sicilian writers we were studying. From statues to tombs to street signs, these Sicilian towns have all chosen different ways to preserve the legacy of these writers and their fictional characters, providing ample evidence (not that any of us needed it) that characters really do live off of the page. We began in…

Continue reading →