For Thanksgiving, a serving of crows.
I wrote the poem “2020” earlier this year. Its first line:
It was a season of crows.
While on one of my morning walks this past summer, I encountered a murder(1) of crows, bouncing and talking (2) on a deep green field under the blue sky of a cloudless young day.
I was immediately struck by the contrast of their jet-black bodies against the green. When some of them took to flight, the contrast against the blue was equally dramatic.
As I...
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BEGINNINGS
I wrote SummerDance, a coming-of-age story about an eleven-year-old boy growing up in Detroit during “that hot dry 1967 summer,” describing “events that ended with me learning to be really scared of my own father, locked screaming in the bathroom, Dad pounding and bellowing to let him in, a thin and splintering door between us.”
The father wasn’t headline-grabbing abusive; instead, he was more have-too-much-to-drink-and-lose-control abusive, beating his boys with a belt,...
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