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A woman’s sixth and last child is born on Mother’s Day. The child carries water borne on the shoulders of the others, in pouches of cloth and leather, filtered through lives and days of the common, the unusual and the fantastic. The child dreams in metaphors, touches colors, speaks in…

Bearing the name my mother gave herself at approximately the age I am now, and the middle name of her maternal grandmother, great grandmother and two of her aunts, Liza Rose James entered this astral plane at 3:17 pm on Monday, April 12th, weighing in at nine pounds four ounces…

You know that lingering smile, before the payphone clicks through, when the moonlight falls like loose change on the bitter blue tiles and the person next to you begins to move like someone you almost remember. Back when dreams made sense. Back when colors ran across the night sky but made no sense at all Plate…

It was roughly forty years ago I laid my life as a poet at the feet of a roomful of friends gathered in my large bedroom in the large house that would soon become known as the South Central Kansas Center for Peace and Social Justice. Poetry had been my…

The sky is a gathering of storms, the river is a casting of jewels, the air is a punishing of all things that long to stand straight and tall, the moon is a waning of all things cold and brittle The redbuds are in full bloom, both flavors, the Eastern…

Someday next month, Liza Rose James will enter this life, carrying the name that you gave yourself, that my son will give in turn to his daughter. The joy of your life, the eighth wonder of your world, your Max, already lives on in his son, Maxwell. I don’t think…

I’ve never grown berry vines before, unless the grape arbor on Holyoke counts. I put in two black raspberry plants last year and they sprouted out beautifully just last week. I realized I had to get serious about some sort of trellis They’re at the back of the main raised…

“When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist.”—Dom Helder Camara We fall behind, the pace is grueling, we can only cover so much ground, there is only so much time, there is…

Clear the trampled decks, cast off the cruel yokes of winter, uproot the unwieldy remnants of the season past, take the brown and blackened beds firmly by the shoulders and gently shove them back to their greenest, most golden glory This morning, there were serious gardening plans and skies seriously…