Elizabeth Barrett Browning "My future will not copy fair my past"--I wrote that once; and thinking at my sideMy ministering life-angel justifiedThe word by his appealing look upcastTo the white throne of God, I turned at last,And there, instead, saw thee, not unalliedTo angels in thy soul! Then I, long triedBy natural ills, received the comfort fast,

I strung all my wrist watches together to make a belt. It was a waist of time. Thanks for explaining the word "copious" to me. It means a lot. I'd tell you a chemistry joke, but I don't know if I'll get a reaction.

However, it happened that an old and humpbacked shepherd passed the tree with his flock, and seeing the prisoner, he stopped and said to him, 'Tell me, my son why are you tied to that tree?' 'Because I was so crooked,' answered the young man; 'but it has quite cured me, and now my back is as straight as can be.' 'I wish you would bind me to a tree,' exclaimed the shepherd, 'so that my back would get straight.' 'With all the pleasure in life,' replied the youth.

Here, the oldest of our two cats contemplates her reflection and queries the meaning of life and identity. This was in a hotel I'd had found in Spartantburg that took during and one of our hurricane evacuations (sometimes called a hurri-cation). I don't recall which hurricane excatly because, after a while, all the named storms that come through during the eleven years we lived in Chalreston began to blur together. I could probably find it in my journals, though.

Winter in Pittsburgh, PA (not quite the Northeast, not quite the Midwest, but dark and cold nonetheless) is for building fires, reading epic novels, streaming new movies and old, knitting and embroidery, dreaming of spring--and spirits, completing jigsaw puzzles and, this year especially, playing Shadowdark with friends. My husband and I joined a Shadowdark game back in April when a good friend from a previous life texted an invitation.

from the Blue Fairy Book edited by Andrew Lang Once upon a time there lived in a certain village a little country girl, the prettiest creature was ever seen. Her mother was excessively fond of her; and her grandmother doted on her still more. This good woman had made for her a little red riding-hood; which became the girl so extremely well that everybody called her Little Red Riding-Hood.

We adopted the youngest of our two cats at the beginning of the pandemic, which makes her a little over five years old now, from a person who'd rescued her from the streets and took her and her litter mates to the vet for basic care, like immunizations and spay/neuter. Because of the youngest’s "colony cat" status, the vet who spayed her also clipped her ear to make it easy to know right away that she'd been fixed and wouldn't be recaptured should she ever find herself on the streets again, which I plan to prevent to all costs.

When the frost settles.

s a final note, should you accept this offer of publication, we will be informing all our submitters for this year in the next week, so if you wouldn’t mind waiting until we’ve done so to announce the good news far and wide, we would very much appreciate it!

A highway patrol officer tried to pull over a speeding car on the interstate, but the car wouldn't stop. He pulled alongside the car and was astounded to see that the old woman behind the wheel was knitting, completely oblivious to the patrol car's flashing lights and siren. The officer shouted over his loudspeaker, "Pull Over!" "No," the old lady yelled back, "it's a scarf!"

O-nami was immensely strong and knew the art of wrestling. In his private bouts he defeated even his teacher, but in public he was so bashful that his own pupils threw him.

My and Gary's reading for Rebecca Aronson's Bad Mouth Poetry Series in Albuquerque, New Mexico on September 6, 2025 at the Q Staff Theater was a long time in the making. We used to live in Albuquerque but relocated to Charleston, SC in July 2013 when Gary was hired as an Assistant Professor at the College of Charleston (and I was later hired as an adjunct) thus bringing to close my third and Gary's second stint living in our favorite city so far.

Sinclair-affiliated stations, including KOMO in Seattle and KATU in Oregon, won’t air Jimmy Kimmel's show despite its reinstatement by ABC on Monday.

my ancestors are druid tree-dwellers, forest dancers intimate with boreal communities and life’s brief promise—

It's not often that a confluence of time, space, energy, and opportunity converge to create an ideal environment for writing. But just such a convergence did occur Friday afternoon, September 12, at the Pitt Writing Center with the workshop "Poetry in Everyday Stories: Celebrating the Empathy of Ed Ochester" facilitated by Pittsburgh's rock star poet, Jan Beatty. As facilitator, Beatty expounded the power of nuance and understatement, the efficacy of concrete detail, and the vibrancy of dialogue.

It's not often that a confluence of time, space, energy, and opportunity converge to create an ideal environment for writing. But just such a convergence did occur Friday afternoon, September 12, at the Pitt Writing Center with the workshop "Poetry in Everyday Stories: Celebrating the Empathy of Ed Ochester" facilitated by Pittsburgh's rock star poet, Jan Beatty. As facilitator, Beatty expounded the power of nuance and understatement, the efficacy of concrete detail, and the vibrancy of dialogue.