Author Archives: janishaag

No, Ma, you are not a size 14 or an XL—you’re the incredible shrinking woman,well below your high school weightof 118, a whopping 101 now, a size 8 at best and certainlya petite. No, you’re not 5-feet-4any more. I’m 5-feet-4, … Continue reading →

(for Donna Gail)•••Granite Bay, summer 1966 We are fish out of water, little sister,far from where we started:flat land close to oceanchoked with palm treesand orange groves, sidewalksfor roller skates and bikes,Disneyland, four grandparents,two aunts and an uncle andtwo older … Continue reading →

Permission granted to: • let your brain roll around in its hard shell• grasp at this thought or that• mull over the to-do list (or avoid it)• allow your monkey mind to leap from branch to branchuntil it settles into … Continue reading →

Last light blazes horizontally throughthe urban jungle of volunteers in all shadesof green, around the thick, old sycamoreflashing leaves the size of bread plates.Sunbeams strike the century-old house,turning its pink stucco vaguely tangerine. On the deck, two slender ficus rise … Continue reading →

Well, you may go to collegeYou may go to schoolYou may have a pink CadillacBut don’t you be nobody’s fool. —from Arthur Gunter’s “Baby, Let’s Play House,”recorded in 1955 by Elvis Presley with additional lyrics ••• On this day in … Continue reading →

In these summer months namedfor Roman emperors—Juliusand his adopted son Augustus—we find ourselves happily fullof two sets of 31 days, and on this, the 31st day ofthe eighth month, the moontonight rises super full, closerto Earth, looking larger andbrighter, but … Continue reading →

(for National Grief Awareness Day) •••I want to praise things that cannot last…I want to praise everything brief and finite.—poet Barbara Crooker••• Praise the too-soon gone:the leaves that decorated springwith their green hands months ago,brittling in the last days of … Continue reading →

(for our father Roger, who art, we imagine, in heaven,and my sister Donna, who, happily, is still embodied) I invoked your names today on the drivewaywhere more than a half century ago one of you taught us how to wash … Continue reading →

(for Kai and Fia Skye) Let’s call it a holiday,24 hours when you canuse any tactics you liketo persuade peopleto verbally admire you (though you’ve decidedto graciously acceptlove notes in any form, too). So you don your mostflattering outfit, poof … Continue reading →

In a way I love them best like this—bleached of springgreen, grass gone golden—though I pray a stray spark,a careless or willful human does not ignite them, these old oaks sentinels solid and silent on undulatingearth under clear blue skies, … Continue reading →