Her Non-fiction

SNEAK PREVIEW from Your Verdict:  A Judge’s Reckoning with Law and Loss

A journalist once asked me how I’ve managed to overcome so much in my life. The question stunned me. It had never occurred to me that I had overcome anything. I was just living my life. What she was referring to, of course, was that, compared with many judges, my life has been unconventional. A working class background. Interracial marriage. Welfare mother, Feminist. Community activist. Bi-sexuality. Poetry. What bothers me about the question is the idea of overcoming something, as if I had to conquer my own life, when this life I’ve been making has also been making me. I am a part of so many of the extraordinary, ordinary events and people in court. People like myself, who try to face life and need a little help doing so.

Flash Fiction: "The Home Visit" published by The Ravens Perch

What you feel here is how it happened there. The grown son was in the garage tinkering with a car. He pretended not to notice me.

"Mississippi Goddam" was published in Valley Voices, a literary review of the HBCU, Mississippi Valley State University, in its special issue “A Sense of Place,” Spring 2022.

In Spring 1927, when Sol Bryson was seventeen, the sky opened up, thunder cracked and the rains poured all the water from heaven into the Ohio River, the Allegheny, the Wabash, the Tennessee, all the tributaries that emptied into the Mississippi as it ran narrow in the Delta, and mud channels pushed back, creating one moving monster of water and all that it carried with it—houses and trees, bodies and parts of all those things and more.  Sol heard the cries and saw the red mud rising like the terror inside him. The water was rising so fast that their cotton field was becoming just a spit of land surrounded by water, a long finger pointing east.  They all ran from it, they had to.

This memoir excerpt will be published in full in the Northern Colorado Writers Anthology, Spring 2023, a collection dedicated to the theme of “Exception/All:  An Exploration of Normal"

In June 1967 Pete learned he had been selected for a summer job in California with the Student Health Project, a federal anti-poverty program.  He asked and I said yes and watched him move into action.  Pete was the great planner, the great provider, controller, idea man, with notes on index cards in his pocket and boxes of loose change on the dashboard.  We had to get to California soon.  But where to get married? The District, where I lived, had a waiting period for blood testing; Virginia, where Pete lived, prohibited interracial marriage. The laws of slavery had written that one-part Negro blood meant you were the master's property, and Jim Crow titrated blood along similar lines.

Third Place, The Colorado Lawyer Poetry Contest, 2006.

If you ever get the chance, live with an artist.

Live with an artist and you begin to notice

the shapes of things.

Even the air around the enormous

sprig of forsythia

in the beer bottle,

the way its presence

makes the room fade away,

its relationship with the white wall,

its simple canvas.

First Place, The Colorado Lawyer Poetry Contest, 2006.

I am watching the freckles

on the back of my fingers

multiply and divide like

lovers under the lens. The

speaker at my podium

says: He's my pimp. Tore

a branch from a tree. Beat

me. The branch broke.

From Empire Magazine, The Denver Post

It is a world of birds here in the morning. Busy magpies with sticks. Occasional duck couples settle into the lake. A thousand starlings fill the empty branches of an enormous poplar. When I look up at the tree again, and the black birds have all departed without a sound, without a trace. I am stunned. I grieved the whole year my last child left home. When I dream at the change of seasons, it is often about them as little children, as they were then, sleek and wild, our life full of surprise and struggle. In the dreams we are together again, as if they arrive and depart from me regularly due to the energy and excitement of the equinoxes. All the seasons of my life circle around and I can be all ages.

Winner of the Silver Solas Women's Travel Writing Award, 2009
The best account by a woman of an encounter or experience on the road.

My first impression of Lhasa is the ubiquitous, identical white-tiled buildings that the Chinese government builds to line the streets, hiding even the grand Potala Palace from our view. Our hotel, although modest, feels like a palace to me. The entrance is beautifully flowered and we have our first sit-down toilet.

Published in Texas Journal on Women and the Law

A measure of justice

40 pounds weighed on the public scale

the child's eyes

look down at his heart for mother.

It's Charleston. 1815…

Memoir Excerpt

In the field of reverie I am wise and wordless. The urge toward words is small and moves quietly, simultaneously with all else that cannot be named.

Article Published in The Coloradan

One little boy is especially scared and crying loudly. It is difficult to tell how much of his distress is physical pain and how much is fear. The noise increases tension in the room, but the professionals keep to their tasks. We worry that the boy’s screams will frighten the waiting children. “This is when you need a clown,” I say to Laurie.

Special to The Denver Post

At the Arlington County Courthouse, they asked about our bloodlines, and in the box marked “race,” Pete wrote “B” for black. I wrote “H” for human.

Finalist, F(r)iction Spring Short Story Contest, 2016

I passed the entrance to Chitral Gol, the wildlife sanctuary where snow leopards hunt horned goats. A tree sparrow and a whistling thrush sang on the holly oaks on the cliff. In a field of snow-covered rhubarb, a pair of partridges called back and forth in staccato, as if I were a wild cat they were warning other birds. Crows swarmed as one body, cawing their criticisms wildly. Who is she? What is she doing? Why is she alone? Where is her husband?

Published in Thinking Women: Introduction to Women’s Studies, Kendall-Hunt, 1995.

I watch you in the court

House coffee shop. Sitting next to

The angry young woman. The one with

A newborn tied to her chest. Fear

And despair criss-cross her back. You…

Published in War, Literature and the Arts, 1997 and in Thomas J. Cooley Journal of Clinical and Practical Law, 2001. It won a Clincal Legal Education Association poetry award.

Glenn Miller was missing. Somewhere over the English Channel,

his plane went down in December 1944. You'd been drafted,

even with a wife and two daughters to support and

day work in a defense plant and night work in the clubs,

your teeth clamped onto the reed of a saxophone, chin tucked in…