Boryrory - A Small Shrub.

Vegan Strawberry Shortcake

Full Moons 2023

People in rooms drinking tea, drinking wine in the same rooms and outdoors, taking trains and driving and planting tomatoes and harvesting tomatoes, kissing or watching others kiss while wanting to be kissed, a spider living by the stove as tigers and grizzly bears roam Ohio being killed after their owner opened their cages and shot himself, people talking about childhood while holding babies, hands behind the heads that can’t support their own weight, eating lunch and other meals at tables, sitting at other tables smoking or wanting to smoke, having a beer in a room before a funeral and a beer in the same room after the funeral, a spider living in the window as a woman cuts all her hair off in Nome and mails it to her mother’s chemoed head in Memphis, people going on too long and people letting people go on too long, standing in a doorway meeting the lover of their son, taking her coat, her scarf, offering tea, liking her smile, people drinking too much and people letting people drink too much, making beds for them, helping them in, people sitting beside people under trees, trees under clouds, clouds under sun, sun under whatever sun is under and beyond reproach.

— Bob Hicok, “Life,” in Elegy Owed

“A week [after Sven’s funeral], I’m cooking fish on a wood fire outside and my son, Yves, brings me a glass of wine to drink and holds a bowl of olives. It’s getting dark and my eyes are sore from the smoke, so I feel for a couple with my fingers without looking, and pop one into my mouth. As I spit out the stone and try to define the flavour–sharp, bitter-black, Greek–a thought crosses my mind: From now on I taste olives for Sven too.”

John Berger, ‘Et in Arcadia Ego’, Confabulations

“The woman sets the table. She watches me beat the eggs. I scramble them in a saucepan, as my now-dead friend taught me; they stand deeper and cook softer, he said. I take our plated, spoon eggs on them, we sit and eat.”

Andre Dubus, “On Charon’s Wharf”, Broken Vessels

“When a dead tree falls in a forest it often falls into the arms of a living tree. The dead, thus embraced, rasp in wind, slowly carving a niche in the living branch, shearing away the rough outer flesh, revealing the pinkish, yellowish, feverish inner bark. For years the dead tree rubs its fallen body against the living, building its dead music, making its raw mark, wearing the tough bough down as it moans and bends, the deep rosined bow sound of the living shouldering the dead.”

Dorianne Laux, “Cello”

About once a week the world smiles at me so wide I can’t bear to look at it– suddenly there is so much light everywhere I fear I will go blind. Maybe it’s the way a stranger says excuse me while slipping by a crowd, the magpie hopping along next to the train tracks, the little bats fluttering around at sundown. I don’t know what it is but the sudden realization that I am alive & the earth is often kind. Isn’t that marvelous? How strange it is to open your eyes to another fresh morning & knowing you can start over at any point

Dante Émile, from "Listening to The Mountain Goats while on public transport"