What seems lost can be found in a bowl of golden fruit, offered in the year’s deepest dark
On Christmas Eve, I stand at the sink, pry open baseball navels, the perfect world of orange: heady zest to the nose, the bitter pith, my thumbs’ push, push to separate flesh from thick rind, not unlike pushing from the old year to the new, birthing the long hidden into daylight.
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Poet William Woolfitt considers his West Virginia heritage in The Night the Rain Had Nowhere to Go
William Woolfitt’s new poetry collection, The Night the Rain Had Nowhere to Go, pays homage to generations of his people in mine-riddled West Virginia. Woolfitt will appear with Linda Parsons, Earl S. Braggs, Rita Quillen, Susan O’Dell Underwood, and others at “A Gathering of Madville Poets” at Addison’s Bookstore in Knoxville on September 7.
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Reflections on the universe under our feet
“What secret Morse is whispered root to stalk to root? What tremorous mystery is alive underground, even when leaves above brown and wither and branches snap at the touch? We forget how intricately we are all connected, even to our yards’ wind-tossed beings that explode pink in April and bronze in October.” Poet, playwright, and essayist Linda Parsons will appear at Addison’s Books in Knoxville on September 7.
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The healing chugs on, even as grief sometimes circles back
I thought, how ironic, these gashes in my lower cheek and chin, hot and throbbing, my face a surprised welt I knew would scar, the left no longer my good side, a fitting present as I enter my “invisible” elder years more fully.
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Sometimes an actual goodbye is beside the point
Who am I to deny this nod from the Universe, this spark of divinity made flesh? I took the small miracle and held it in my hands like a caramel sweet enough to hurt my teeth.
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Our visit to Alcatraz opened my eyes and heart
My daughter didn’t go to Alcatraz willingly. She grumbled the whole way, punctuating the morning with sarcasm: “Yay, it’s prison day!” Perhaps she was right — what purpose did it serve to see this horrific chapter of history?
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