Samplings Of My Work

I Hate Poets

Sneaking through stairwells,
Peering through stacks of books
at ordinary people--
Staring with their pale poet eyes 
As they creep by,
A six-pack of poems 
In each tiny, pink palm.  

Hmm.  the start of something...
03/18/2013
Her name was Hazel  Flynn. Some shortened it to ‘Haze,’ and that was okay with her—on  the one hand, it implied the indistinct, maybe foggy state of the world when the  sun meets the cold, atmospheric damp, and on the other there was the verb ‘to  haze,’ as in ‘hazing rituals,’ which gave it a kind of urban toughness  completely opposite from the first connotation. “Hazel” itself was  okay—Mom had named her after the leader rabbit in Watership
Down. Also, there was a  Celtic tale about mythic
hazelnut trees around a sacred pool and the nuts fell  into the water and gave the fish wisdom. The Gaelic hero Fin  McCool somehow absorbed the magic from one of these hazelnut-fish—they’d learned  this years ago in Mr. Bracone’s Honors Myth and Lit  class in sixth grade; ever since, her nicknames had included “Fin,” “McCool,”  “Flynn McCool,” and “Fin Flynn.” It was good to have clever  friends. 
 
On this day, Georgia and Reggie  were coming the
other direction toward the bus stop as usual, and Georgia called out, “you’re too cool, McCool, for a coat like the  rest of us?” It was March in Tennessee and Saturday had been  beautiful, nearly seventy degrees,
so Hazel was holding on to the idea even into  Monday morning, which was barely forty, and she’d worn her jean vest over a  light sweatshirt. Both of the others were bundled tight. 

“Eyes toward summer,” Hazel  said, squinting into
the sun. “Only way to get it here.” 

Reggie grinned his  large-toothed, large-lipped,
handsome grin (he’d always been like some teen  idol) and said, “I could dream me some summer about now… tell us what it’ll be  like, Fin.” 

“We’ll get to the ocean and  we’ll get jobs there,
on the boardwalk jobs so we can see the ocean all day long  even if we’re scooping popcorn or whatnot…” 

Georgia  interrupted, always the
practical one, “Myrtle? Charleston? Virginia  Beach?”

“Any beach will do,” Hazel  said. The bus huffed and puffed its way around the corner and they  sighed in
unison.

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