GRIM REAPER

At the beginning of summer solstice,
the tall grasses sizzled in the morning heat,

that snapped and hissed like snakes as I swung the scythe. 

When the shining blade bit hidden metamorphic stone,

the pendulous power reverberated back up the arm like an echo. 

My flanks and arms ached with the long history of a slow dance,

as I wielded the ancient tool, unchanged since the Middle Ages. 

Soon the horses will come down to graze on the bright grass. 

The stout oak-handled scythe, long since replaced 

by a plastic lime green battery-powered strimmer, 

to fell the wild oats and rattlesnake grass reaching skyward.

After a long, wet winter, they are taller than me.

The horses are long gone, at night the deer will browse 

and check on my slow progress as I clear the upper fields. 

Generations of tree swallows attempt to return to the eaves, 

sealed off for decades, genetic memory that deeply embedded.

The crows are upset because I put up the summer tent,

at dawn they share raucous displeasure from the safety of trees,

a hawk circles the deep valley and keens for her lost fledglings, 

the woodpecker drills and probes the depths of the dead pine.

Douglas firs grizzled with lichen, encroach upon the vestiges 

of open space where my grandmother once tended the garden.

Poison oak and coyote bush protect saplings of live oak and pine.

I wake to a primeval silhouette of bachelor deer on the tent walls.

Last winter, a limb from the dead pine sheared off the corner eave 

of the old house, leaving it raw and exposed to the elements.

Nothing much left of the garden except volunteer cherry plums, 

a dying pear tree we cannot save, even with severe pruning,

and the golden delicious apple tree is so far gone, 

only a thin cambium ribbon threads the roots to branches, 

the heartwood of the tree exposed, hosting shelf fungus,

the black cankers having already done their job decades ago. 

How many decades are measured in this garden, the cultivation 

of lifetimes, but the wilderness returns of its own volition.

THE DANCER ON THE LEOPARD ROAD

—an ekphrastic poem after DCastro's The Dancer

The eye of the sun leopard follows the dancer,
her saguaro arms raised high, the oculi, the false eyes,

like oilspots on the road, follow her every move,

while ox-eyed daisies sway in the aqua air 

filled with dreams of red jalopies of another era 

that take to the skies like a swarm of bees 

seeking a new home on the horizon. 

The open road disappears into the distance 

mountains pierce the sky, letting all the air out 

until we droop like flat tires waiting for a bicycle pump

to clock a little more mileage under our belts. 

The hazel-eyed sun and its sunspots—beauty marks—

watch us as the exuberant dancer cartwheels up the road. 

But there are also ghost dancers on the plains. 

A woman carries a parcel while her sisters rise up 

like a dense winter ground fog hiding in the rushes. 

And the dancer on the leopard spotted road 

with her three legs, and starburst chamise,

is prancing like a runaway circus pony, 

while spinning vortices or black holes 

are waiting to draw us all in.

6/7/24 CPITS workshop with Jessica Cardenas Wilson

The Milkman

Sometimes I feel like a friggin' gameshow host lost in my own reality show, you know the kind where Vanna White comes out all dolled up, stalking across the set in impossible high heels, and her red polyester dress has its own chorus of crazy going on like cicadas in the wings shrieking up a storm. Only I am never dressed for the part.

Meanwhile, I’m wondering how I got here, why I was chosen for this particular drama, and what the premise is. Someone forgot her notes, luckily for me, faking it is second nature—not like those anxiety dreams when I was in second grade. 

I often dreamed that I took off my snazzy red woolen coat I've had since I was four. It's a bit too snug and threadbare—only I forgot to put on a dress. I’m wearing knickers and one of those wife beater undershirts, trimmed with lace and a tiny bow on my chest to feminize it. It could be worse, I could have been in my pajamas. 

Realizing my error, I hide in the alcove, afraid to come out of the closet—so to speak. I can’t stay in there all day. The teacher is taking role and is about to mark me tardy. Story of my life. Either I’m always missing the bus, or I forget to dress for the part. 

Everyone else is properly clothed and primly sitting at their desks with hands folded, the teacher too. I can’t go out there. Is there a sweater, or a pillowcase art smock I can borrow? She calls out my school name. The I'm in trouble name. Not my family name. All eyes are on me. Stagefright is real.

The teacher is both judge and jury, she calls my name, so I slip on my red woolen coat with its frayed red silk lining and black velvet collar, to join the class. She is annoyed, and will stay annoyed with me for the rest of the school year, no matter what I do. 

She thinks she is hiding it well. But I can tell. I will flub my lines. It will become a familiar pattern. I will become excellent at subterfuge and hiding my inadequacies, always dressed for the wrong part—not like the other kids who seem to have a grasp as to what is going on. 

This fugue state will be my modus operandi all throughout school. I'm a bootstrap kid. Myself and I. And the cats. Only later will I discover that the real director of this particular reality show is called dyslexia, not the indifferent teacher. But no one will cotton onto it. They will leave me sitting alone in a corner, punishing me for what I cannot seem learn, never asking why. And so, I will become an excellent actor, fooling everyone, including myself. The mimic.

Danette and Gail are teacher's pets. They always know what to wear. Cute little frocks nicely ironed, and crisp skirts, so they look like upended tulips sitting in the first row. Dennis, the dreamboat, slicks back his dark slicked pompadour carefully with one hand. Later, I realize it’s a studied gesture probably practiced in front of the bathroom mirror. 

He smells like his father Dean, the milkman who is a stand-in for Rock Hudson. During summer I loved Tuesday mornings when he drove up the dirt road to our house in the old Lucas Valley milk truck. I’d come flying down the road in my PJs with my long pigtails wagging behind me. 

He’d pick me up and spin me into the air until I was airborne, breathless. I giggled and it felt like I was soaring with the birds until he put me down on the ground. Did he also do this with his own kids? The other kids on his milk route? I suspect so. The model was at hand.

One time he asked if we want anything other than the usual 2 quarts of milk standing tall in glass jug. I dreamed big and added orange juice and cottage cheese to the list, not realizing my grandmother would have to scrabble next week to pay the bill from my impromptu purchases. Math was never my strong suit.

I sat on the wooden milk box and ate the cottage cheese with two fingers, washing it down with orange juice straight from the bottle. I had no idea how I would explain any of this to my grandmother. See, it was my job to collect the milk before the crows got to it. They would flip open the milk box and peck off the foil and cardboard cap to get to the cream. Strange to think of those black crows wanting white milk. The cats lined up waiting for the spoils.

Sometimes we forgot to collect the milk. It would turn to cottage cheese right in the bottles under the hot summer sun. She’d complain about it, and then strain the curdled milk in cheesecloth, feeding the whey to the hungry cats who scrambled into a furry pile with spats and hisses. Sometimes she made paper-thin pancakes for dinner stuffed with cottage cheese laced with lemon juice and sugar. It was a win-win situation as far as I was concerned.

Sometimes in winter when we forgot the milk overnight, the little foil caps that were perched on top of frozen cream expressed out of the bottle, looking like long-necked swans. I didn’t have a father or a mother figure so Dean the Milkman was like a surrogate practice dad. He was a model, so I could be like the other kids. He said he didn't have a little girl, just two boys, Dennis and Steve. I tell him that Dennis is in my class. Can I be his little girl?

I always looked forward to seeing the milkman. A story that his son, Dennis, would never learn. He will also never know that I had a crush on him all through school. I didn’t want to jinx the situation. But the situation jinxed itself. Driving back up Lucas Valley Road after the bars had closed, Dean flipped his beautiful boat of a white convertible into a ravine.

Dennis hid behind a curtain of grief, dressed in black for the rest of the school year. He still smelled like Dean. I was in a fugue state and thought of my red coat. What about the milk, who would deliver the milk to our door? Who would toss me into he air? It was a closed casket ceremony, said my grandmother. The spotlight shone on Dean like a reality show before the final curtain dropped.

6/6/24 WOW—Wide Open Writing with Franny French

The detritus of memory

Lately I’ve been writing this story in my head from the days before I became a writer, always reminding myself to remember, remember. Whether it was the way the fog rolled in over the mountain, with its chill breath, or the litany of things I saw during the day. Wild animals carried the highest tally, or something my grandmother showed me: how to build a Saint Bridget Cross from the tule rushes that grew in hedgehog clumps following the water table in the upper garden.

I’ve been writing this since I first began to wander afield, collecting an inventory of plants I had no names for, leaving off from where my grandmother, no longer able to accompany me on our early morning walks, no longer instructed. For example, the names of plants. I had to wait an entire lifetime to label and categorize them. All of those jigsaw puzzles of memory became placeholders, waiting for identification, for what knowledge I did not yet have a place for in my head. My eyes remembered those nameless plants, I tucked them away in my mind, a treasure chest to unpack at the end of a long life.

I’ve been waiting for the circle to find its beginning and end, the Ouroboros of memory and history jockeying for position during those liminal moments where you’re neither neither awake nor asleep, where dreams and reality merge like mist, and you can’t tell where one memory or dream left off and another one began.

I’ve been waiting all this time to live my real life, though I’ve been living it all along, but it always felt like it was on hold, waiting for the right moment. What right moment? Maybe it was because I was afraid of change and caution was my handicap, I was always keeping things in obliettes because nothing is ever guaranteed, other than life nor death—other than the struggle between the here and now and the there and then.

Lately I’ve been sharing the stories of the past with new old friends, thinking surely that wasn’t me I was describing a lifetime ago. The inside and outside worlds colliding, head on, and I wonder about all those dropped stitches constantly unraveling the tapestry of our lives, those dropped threads leading us in other directions.

Lately I’ve been gathering in the narration of a life hidden in the dungeon of memory, wondering why I am still here. It seems like there is little to look forward to, but then I realize it’s a habit I’ve dragged with me from the earliest days. The if not now, then when, the what if motif of regret. But there is always the now.

Lately I’ve been collecting the detritus on the shores of darkness, finding odd solace there. The creatures I see become unnamed talismans: a lizard, a young gophersnake or the tree swallows seeking the eaves of my grandmother‘s house. The vents were closed off a half century ago, but home is genetically imprinted in their memory banks, and though untold generations have come and gone, they still swoop and practice landing, banking upward only to be met by steel mesh. I remember the day their babies fell out of the nest and we found a tall ladder to return them to the eaves and the inconsolable parents, swooping and crying.

I am lost and have no ending for this piece. The mosquitoes have been drilling into my forehead, reminding me of the fallout of a wet winter.  I can’t stop thinking about pipevines, for example, the only source of food for the pupae of the rare black swallowtail. How slender the thread of life is. Or the return of the bluebirds after a half-century of absence. The partial reversal of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. Near extinction is always at hand.

Lately I’ve been letting go, perhaps returning to the void where we no longer matter. As I face the deep grass of the upper field that must be cut before the arrival of summer, is a race against time because after a long wet winter, the grass is still too wet to cut. And when I when I was young, weed-eaters didn’t exist, so I used a scythe—that father time image—and that zing and waltz of felled grass became an ingrained song of the field..

Lately I’ve been remembering about all the almost lovers I was too afraid to let in, let alone, to let out. I mourn for my amethyst earring gone missing—something I’ve had since I was a teenager, whoever finds it will not know the stories it carried from Inverness. Or the ring of Italian gold, the band so thin after a lifetime of wearing it, like a shaft of sunlight, the chip out of the stone reminds me of a playful kick meant for my rear from Neil as we walked about around above Lake Merritt. I should have left him then, but I waited 20 years to make a move. I wear it to remember, and the pungent odor of wcut grass brings it all back home.

6/6/24 Write On! with Susie Terence

SEEKING PARADISE

Sometimes, if I’m lucky, I can see the landscape, 

how it once was before civilization tamed it. 

I imagine my eyes, focusing split-level, 

like the eyes of gobis, mudskippers and frogs 

as they navigate the twain worlds of water, mud and air. 

Call it split vision. Or invoking the ghosts.

Seeing the dual landscape was a coping mechanism, 

something I had learned at an early age—

while trying to plumb the old stories of then versus now. 

A distant then, a then that never was 

in the case of fairytales and myths 

harkening back to another age, 

another era where anything was possible.

Call it paradise, or call it a garden 

but even that is a tamed landscape.

Sometimes it’s like a time warp. 

For example, the land of my childhood,

before the houses, before the invasive species, 

both plant and animal. I imagined 

vast tracts of land, the hills painted with wildflowers.

Or Hanamua Bay before the coral bleached. 

It was a veritable garden from whence we came.

But then the tourist arrived in droves and loved it to death. 

In fact, we have gone and loved the entire world to death, 

it is like an addiction, seeking out paradise on the brink.

And then we lament and wonder why it’s no longer pristine.

And we have only ourselves to blame.

5/22/24 Write On! with Nels Christiansen 

DEATH IN RAGS

See how Death is depicted as an old woman, 

dressed in rags, old beyond reckoning, 

from beyond the borderlands of time, 

always waiting in the wings 

like a carrion bird patrolling the land 

for those too young to know that their very lives 

depend upon camouflage or divine intervention. 

Pity the mother holding the child against the wind, 

not the east wind toward the birth of dawn, 

not the west wind to the end of the road, 

but to the north, where the chill winds,

unseasonable in late spring 

slither across the corners of the soul 

seeking prey among the fallen, 

especially those sleeping rough in the streets 

and those plagued by disease or the infirm. 

But sometimes she hunts for live prey, 

more like the eagle, not the vulture 

waiting to give us wings to those unwary souls 

who think she is a myth that time forgot.

5/7/24 Write On! with Nels Christiansen 

Seamus Heaney’s last words

At the Celtic colloquium, some hot young scholar, flexing the biceps of his intellect, presented a thesis on poet Seamus Heaney and synesthesia, insisting that Seamus was unaware of what he was doing. that it came naturally. Everyone nodded their heads sagely as if in agreement. I spluttered. The air was dancing with the images of Klee and Kandinsky, tight little figures dueling in the air, musical notes taking flight. The sharp odor of oranges, a pungent wake-up call. 

But mine was the lone voice of dissent,  the presenter’s words grated like a nail-file, full of grit and dust. The pale afternoon light was a seething beast of contradiction. I said, But all poets mix their senses. It comes with a turf, thinking outside the box. Tools of the trade.  It’s a territorial imperative of sorts. My voice twirled into scarlet ribbons, and bled out on the floor, I thought of the barber’s pole spinning madly. No one was listening.

Just today, I was working on my car and as I jabbered to myself, I realized I was automatically rendering my inane actions into prose, it’s something that goes on in the background, sub rosa, like that orchestra of tinnitus in my ears. No off switch. But the prose began to take on a life of its own, mixing the senses as if trying the idea on for size, dressing metaphor in the aisles at the thrift store. Do I remember any of them? Of course not. It happens on a subliminal level and then I unwind the process later. 

So, besides coming into the writing workshop late, I can’t seem to create an environment where synaesthesia will flourish naturally. Today, I am a bystander. Late late late. But when someone reads about Provincetown, I think of Fire Island, a place I’ve never been, and Frank O’Hara in Why I am not a Painter, wrote a dozen poems on oranges—he doesn’t mention the word orange once, while his friend Mike painted the word sardines on his canvas—and then obliterated it until all that was left was a few  letters. And he called it Sardines. I think of those elusive silvered fish of thought, wishing it was another kettle of fish altogether. I wanted it to be salmon, the fish of wisdom.

I imagined Seamus Heaney in an old dressing gown, and tattered slippers rundown at the heel, squatting  over a mossy pond like Bashō, as if in benediction, feeding the fish hazelnuts. But I am allergic to hazelnuts. The epipen is my lodestone. Wisdom ululating in the sacred well with haloed words ripening on the wind. And language becomes a palimpsest of lost thoughts. Words begin to blur on the edges of the canvas until they swim away into the air.

The fish seeking the secrets of the air, all those wayward words nibbling at the shore of cyberspace. I would’ve written more, finally I was in the zone, but my iPad shut down mid-sentence with a warning that it was too hot to continue. The screen turned black as night with no stars in sight. The thermometer bled down the screen. Not even Andromeda could rescue me now. It timorously asked, Would you like to make an emergency call? I thought of Seamus’s last words: Noli timere. Be not afraid, as a black dalia of blood blossomed in his brain.

1/2/24 WOW Writes, with Dulcie Witman

EL MITAD DEL MUNDO

We were driving after dark, always a risky business in the deserts of Baja California, but we were caught between villages. We thought we were invincible on the gringo trail thinking we could outpace the darkness. First, it was an overturned truckload of jicama roots, like hundreds of blind eyes or small moons seeking orbit. Then it was the donkey crossing the road, then a red steer. Our headlights cut through the darkness like kitchen knives. The stars were brilliant this far from civilization, only darkness and the weeping stars to accompany us the shoulders of the narrow road with potholes large enough to swallow the VW bug. it was a slalom course. And, the headlights were a skein of light cutting the darkness into pieces. Something striped with an impossible long tail—an escapee from a Dr. Seuss book—ran in front of us, and there was no time to swerve, no way to avoid it on the raised road bed, a slender thread built for flash floods, was like a dyke. The wheelwell thump told us it was not a lucky night for that creature. My first and last sighting of a cuatamundi, the felling of a rare animal beneath that carnage. then it dawned on me the warning not to drive after dark was equally dangerous for the local animals as well. 

4/24 Write On! with Nels Christiansen

CONSIDER THE RIVER

CONSIDER THE RIVER

Consider the river wending its way 

from the frozen north to where the old school 

holds onto the old ways, where the rights of some 

outnumbers the rights of those oppressed by race, 

or poverty, or creed. The river brings to those of us 

living downstream a longing for portage across 

that inconsolable distance no explorer will breech, 

no bridge will ever span, and yet we attempt unity

by virtue of humanity. And fail utterly. 

Only the shining river spills into the bay, 

spills into freedom, spills into light.

4/17/24 Write On! with Nels Christiansen

HORSES IN SNOW

Two dark horses in shaggy winter coats

stamp their feet in anticipation,

seeking an escape from the bed of snow. 

The mountains fold into the valley like fitted sheets. 

The soughing conifers shake their bows free,

spring delayed with no chance of surcease. 

The hardwood fence is a bridge for small rodents 

to cross the blanket of frozen ground. 

The horses pace, each in opposite directions 

as if on a treadmill to move the seasons along. 

They’ve beaten a trail in the bauchy ice,

eagerly await their hay, but it is late again, 

and they worry the fence line as if urging it 

to spring into action, knowing they can’t dig down 

to the dry grasses buried below snowline.

4/4/24 Molly Fisk Poem a Day

MEZZALUNA

A brown child stands at attention 

with her long, dark hair nailed to the wall 

in a reverse sunburst, or an implosion.

She resembles the night studied with stars. 

Her smile reaches all the way to her toes. 

She doesn’t yet know that she is on display.

Will always be judged by the blade.

4/2/24 Molly Fisk Poem a Day

OUT OF SEASON

Once upon a time I bought a princess pumpkin, 

more gourd than orange with salmon red crenelations.

We were waiting for a brace of horses 

to take us to the ball. I had no gown, no glass slippers, 

but soot covered the ground dark as night. 

The Uber horses never arrived. 

They were booked for a more lucrative fairytale. 

So they sent an Easter bunny the color of coal.

Instead of whisking me away, he set to 

eating the seeds, leaving a pile of black eggs 

perhaps as punishment for calling him last minute.

Prince Charming was running late and sent Jack instead. 

But he has two left feet and ate Englishmen for breakfast.

Fairy Godmother was sleeping it off in the corner 

muttering how someone had mixed up her spells 

and everything was coming out all wrong. 

The world had turned to ashes. Needing a scapegoat, 

she blamed the long shadows of crows loitering in the car park.

No one was going to get out of this carnival dead or alive.

4/1/24 Molly Fisk Poem a Day

WHAT THE MIND WANTS

My mind wants hot buttered scones, 

not too sweet, and best dripping with salted butter. 

It wants that fat that delivers flavor, 

those omega fatty 3 acids, you know, like salmon. 

It wants payload, it wants soothing. 

It is always raging against something—

including the dying of the light. 

Sometimes I can’t control all that anger and angst. 

It doesn’t want burnt toast, it wants new ideas, 

new horizons, not the dregs of the past, regurgitated. 

That’s all it asks for. Nothing more.

2/24 Write the mind open with Patrice Veccione

MAYDAY, MAYDAY

I do love a good parade and a procession.
There’s a lamplit parade down by the harbor, 

Victorian women and children all dressed in white 

circle the lake carrying Chinese paper lanterns lit with candles,

the trail snakes on for miles. What are they celebrating? 

A Mayday parade? Suffragettes? A ghost army on the move? 

From the wrought iron balcony two men look on,

they flex their biceps with their sleeves rolled up,

as if the muggy evening were asking for trouble. 

2/14/24 Molly Fisk PaD

CABARET

Vanity, thy name is Peacock standing on a vanity. 

Well, actually the peacock is preening himself 

in front of the mirror in a public restroom, 

possibly at a park, but at least he chose the men’s room. 

It could be worse. Maybe he was avoiding the long loo lines.

He admires himself and his tres chic body double,

never taking on his reflection like some birds I know. 

No head-banging against the glass like that chickadee 

I finally had to capture to give him a time out 

before he broke his beak in a testosterone-induced rage.

The peacock’s long tail is like a ballgown train, 

perhaps he is planning to attend the Oscars for best of show. 

Or he’s an exotic dancer escaped from the Folies Bergère. 

He’s got the long legs perfect for the role. But this is not Paris.

Why he chose that place to admire himself and preen, 

I suspect it is something we will never know.

2/13/24 Molly Fisk PaD

WORK HORSE, DAWN RUN

Seagulls frantically circle the trawler at dawn, 

hoping for a handout while the dark sky broods, 

threatening rain, but the morning sun 

ignites the surface of the sea with an amber fire. 

The Sea Farmer chugs south towards the open sea, 

or perhaps he’s headed to Tomales Bay or Bodega Harbor 

while the landfolk sleep sound in the coastal hills, 

recumbent as a woman tangled up in sheets, 

and no one in the houses is awake. 

All the dark windows of the soul are closed,

dreaming of an open sea.

2/11/24 Molly Fisk PaD

FOUR STARLINGS

In the photograph, four speckled starlings 

still in their baby fuzz, congregate, 

their shadows aligned to the sun. 

This is how murmuration begins, like that. 

Soon they will take to the sky and dance on the wing, 

following an inner music only they can hear 

as they pulse and weave at dusk 

while we listen to the thrumming of feathers 

beating out a percussion in the air. 

Nothing prepares you for the sound, 

it’s something you have to witness at least once, 

to see those unpredictable sentinels queue up 

for a rave in the sky, as dressing a prayer 

for the wind.

2/10/24 Molly Fisk PaD

SELF PORTRAIT AS A SEA URCHIN

It’s all in the exoskeleton, where divergence occurs. 

Or what makes us different from the others. 

How we reshape our inner landscape to fit our vision. 

Someone posted a psychology test 

where the beginning of a maze dead-ended. 

Nowhere to go, as if offering a conundrum 

was beneficial to teach children to think different.

But I learned from that playbook the hard way 

because I can’t help but think outside the box. 

So I went in the exit and worked my way back

to the center, not knowing it was the answer. 

And I thought of how we present ourselves in our finery. 

Call it armor if you must, so as not to let anyone in,

or that urge to catch a glimpse of our fictitious selves, 

in our attempts to hide from what is in front of us.

2/9/24. Molly Fisk PaD.

GRAZING IN STARK BEAUTY, MONTGOMERY PASS, NV

A band of mustangs grazes 

in high mountain meadows, 

ignoring the man resting against his motorcycle. 

To each his own, horsepower is horsepower, 

even when it’s twice removed from beauty. 

The granite range the continental divide 

dreams of the snow that will paint 

the alpine meadows in white.

The weary sagebrush bend their heads,

grizzled before their time, 

scud clouds portending snow.

2/8/24 Molly Fisk, poem a day

Full moon bridge

The medieval bridge built in a half circle meets itself full circle in the middle of the placid river. It could be Tibet, it could be Italy, or Scotland. Once I saw a perfect reflection of Kelvin Bridge down at the river bank. 

The shore lined with hypodermic needles tied us to this century. Go down to the river and flirt with death, seeking a path to nirvana that will take you down. The circle of Kelvin Bridge and river contemplates itself in a wilderness out of time with the mean streets of Glasgow. 

Meanwhile in Tibet, the photo is of a primitive cow and her calf follow their owner across an old bridge, still standing. He should be from another era with his bamboo hat and palm frond rain cape. He carries the harness yoke for her on his right shoulder. She needs no lead line to know that they are going home.

Once I crossed the Brig o’ Doon in Alloway, a pure arc across the river. Someone had strewn red carnations on the cobbled footpath. There is a new bridge for cars, but here time stops and lets no one pass. 

The herringbone pattern of cobbles was laid to confuse and thwart witches, a drunken Tam O’Shanter on the run. Well done, Cutty Sark.The creatures of the night cannot cross the water so they sulk and wait for the poet. While he had the DTs, Rabbie Burns taunted too many thirsty warlocks looking for the keystone. Not to mention Nannie, who caught the tail end of the horse.

2/7/24 Molly Fisk, poem a day, OK, so it’s not a poem.