Author Archives: janishaag

Pretend there’s a cup of water on the dashboard,said the former ambulance driver,and you must drive so carefully, so gently,that you don’t spill a drop. I tried with everything in meafter his surgery to make the drive homeas gentle as … Continue reading →

for the brave and beautiful writers who write with me a rough untamed onewhere wildness roams& daring rambleswhere nothingis trimmedor clippedto impossibleperfection where you dancewith abandonsing loudlybecause you can where there isno commandto color inside the linesstay in the boxpunctuate … Continue reading →

for Curtis It’s not that I’ll be 65 next month,or that I’ve had to wade throughthe confusion of Medicare, butthe long-loved optometristsaying, I’m pulling the trigger— something we’ve talked aboutfor years—writing the prescriptionfor drops that, she promises, willplump up my … Continue reading →

unlike x or y, which can be,the online dictionary quiz implies,so I rack my brain for words—victor, va-va-voom, environment— and then root around for the silent x—well, faux pas, but that’s French.Because I cannot conjure silent y words,I hurl myself … Continue reading →

What we call morninggleams down the throatof this purple beauty, as if lit from within,opening its larynx soits vocal cords can sing the day awake,which I’ve gotten upand outside to see, unusually, notexpecting this glow,or the sound of the windless … Continue reading →

Not the Jerry Garcia type, but the gardening one,grabbing clippers and heading out to the yardto nip the spent buds, toss them on the grassso they might be picked up later, of pinching the shriveled pink bits that only days … Continue reading →

The baby born on my 29th birthdayis having a baby today, and, though I am not there, as I waswhen my niece made her debut I do not mind. That day, almost36 years ago, taught me how difficult it is … Continue reading →

It feels like a moment ago—not years—when I delivered books of her poetry to her shortly before her death, put a copyin her hands, watched the skin stretched thin over her knuckles as she strokedthe glossy cover of the slender … Continue reading →

Hose in hand, watering plantsin Mom’s back yard on a day somild it hardly qualifies as summer,I look up at the tree that’s grownthere for decades, dark greenleathery leaves shading oblong’quats snuggled in trios, some ofthe fallen already underfoot. And, … Continue reading →

Come for me now, World—whatever is near, come close.I have been over the waterand lived there all alone. —William Stafford (1914–1993)excerpt from “Looking Across the River” in “The Darkness Around Us Is Deep” ••• It’s time to re-enter the worldknowing … Continue reading →