The Home Visit

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.

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Mississippi Goddam

"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.

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Summer of Love

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.

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A Tour of East Colfax Avenue, Denver, Colorado, circa 1974

The New York Quarterly in 2022.

I wrote this poem in response to a prompt given by poet Carolyn Forche in a Lighthouse Writers workshop focused on the poetry of witness. 

To wander East Colfax Avenue in the 1970s is to be young, female, angry and ripe, a June tomato planted early, reddens on the vine, splits open and bleeds. It runs down your leg and stains the street. You don’t stop, you don’t wipe, you let it remain, to remind us of the disappeared women, to remember Joan Little, the inmate who refused the guard in the prison kitchen with an ice pick.

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My Sisters Made of Light

Colorado Book Award-Literary Fiction, Finalist

My Sisters Made of Light is a novel set inside Pakistan’s human rights movement, 1957 to 1994. The story follows three generations of a Pakistani family as they make their way through life in the political, social, and religious maze that is their motherland. This novel pulls readers into the fascinating, heartbreaking, and often terrifying world of honor crimes against women in Pakistan through the life and family history of Ujala, a dedicated teacher. When Ujala decides to follow the path her mother has prepared for her, she pushes aside fears to help other women escape from impossible situations.

AN EXCERPT FROM THE NOVEL:

In 1958 the air was still sour with the stench of the slaughters that had occurred eleven years earlier when the British ran like dogs and India cracked. The blade that slashed the map also partitioned the bodies of the people, etching fear in their bellies and revenge in their hearts. Ten million people migrated. Lines and lines of Hindus from the Indus River Valley, in what would later be designated “Pakistan,” packed their lorries, rode bullocks, and walked, to cross the border into India. Lines and lines of Muslims from India carried all that they owned to be part of the new Islamic nation. Rioting occurred first in Calcutta and then spread to Punjab. The refugees scouted the routes to avoid one another in the passing. If a trainful of Hindus was murdered by Muslims from Lahore (and they were), then a trainful of Muslims would be murdered by Sikhs and Hindus from Amritsar (and they were). Entire families were butchered and their body parts were delivered by horseback to their villages. The people emptied baskets of breasts and pails of penises onto the ground—even the stubs of baby penises with scrotums like tiny figs. The soil was soaked with all the lost futures, and when it was done, when the trauma finally subsided to abide in the bodies of the people, they had to plant seeds in, and eat the fruit of, the same earth. Sikhs and Muslims alike knew the taste of each other’s blood well, and they kept to their own.

Kulraj and Nafeesa in London. Romeo and Juliet in Verona. A Muslim and a Sikh in Pakistan. All of history conspired against them, but no matter. They would find a new way.

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Ten Ways of Looking at the West

Sage Green Journal (http://sagegreenjournal.org/jacqueline-st.-joan.html)

I

I drive the canyons of the West

Deliberately,

The way I drag my finger between

The shoulder blades of the cat.

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A Mother's Advice to her Children

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.

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White Rain

Honorable Mention, The Colorado Lawyer Poetry Contest, 2006.

Although it is summer evening,

hair spray and Nescafé

smell so strong and familiar

it makes one wonder if it is morning or night.

In the tiny yellow bathroom,

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Life in Two seasons: Love Here, Love Gone

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.

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What Love Looks Like in Public

Memoir Excerpt

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.

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Meeting the Dalai Lama in Tibet

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.

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a beautiful thing

Published in Mountain Talking, Fall, 2016 and Sage Green Journal

It is a beautiful thing to wake

in the dark chill of October

and go out into it

where a crescent moon

and two stars appear both ahead

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Dead Baby

Published in The Denver Quarterly

There's a dead baby in your yard

the newsboy said when he knocked on the door.

It was over by the fence. It was naked. It was blue.

It was bloody placenta all over the ground

and red spots on the fence. Red spots on the fence

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Letter to Muriel Rukeyser at the End of the Twentieth Century

Denver Press Club Poetry Award

Your poems shock

the way waterlilies burning in a museum

shock the moneyed. With fragrant treason you begged even the rich,

to understand, As you spoke to each generation as that generation,

your dark hair curled in the thirties

by a passion electric for justice.

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What Zero Looks Like

First Place, Lyrical Poetry, Columbine Poets of Colorado, 2015

He says, What’s the biggest number?

What’s out there, after atmosphere and space?

We are driving home from preschool.

There is no biggest number, I say.

There is always one more.

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Cough Drop Joe

This “family fiction,” won the 2019 Black Sheep Award of the Colorado Genealogical Society

In those days I’d take the train from Union Station in Denver, my home town, to Union Station in Washington, D.C., where the reporting work was. It took a couple of days, but it gave me time to do some writing in the dining car that had a quiet bartender, and to watch the country roll by. There were hobo camps along the rails--you could tell by the smoke. I could take a close up look at them and then roll on by, settle back, open a book or pick up a pen.

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The Left Margin

Second Place, Free Verse, Columbine Poets of Colorado, 2016

I love the margins,

the left margin

that anticipates comment,

leaves room for

corrections, doodles,

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