Molly Fisk: Cancer, again
this time a slow- growing rarity tracing delicate tendrils through kidney and liver, the lung’s sturdy wall, artery somewhere I can’t remember, though twice I’ve been told. How the mind … Continue reading
Molly Fisk: Let Me Call You Sweetheart
Yesterday a young man called me sweetheart and then widened his eyes and asked “Is that OK, to call you sweetheart? I call everyone I like sweetheart, even the men.” … Continue reading
Molly Fisk: Nine Short Lives
One of my cats just jumped to the floor from the bathroom sink, where he’d been sipping drops of leftover water, and made a very loud thump. I looked up … Continue reading
Molly Fisk: National Politics
Even though we watch every year as the snow melts and runs along ditches and gutters, finds the low places, enters the creeks and the culverts, fanning out wider to … Continue reading
Molly Fisk: An Apiary Has Nothing to Do with Apes
One of the things I’m good at is linking people together. Not match-making, although two couples have married who fell in love during my poetry class. Usually it’s more practical: … Continue reading
Molly Fisk: Heading home
This is and is not a Wendell Berry novel,
a Mary Oliver poem. This is one block of a California Gold Rush
town with a bloody, tree-less history, known mostly now for pot
and a kind of rueful quaintness, where people you love
have died and been buried, have been born.
Molly Fisk: Clichés of Our Times
I am not so blessed or so not blessed, being a lapsed Unitarian who believes only in oaks and sunlight, nor am I honored, a once-bright thought now sunk into … Continue reading
Molly Fisk: On the Disinclination to Scream
If I had been a ten year old stranger
and you had tripped me in a dark alley, say,
downtown, instead of our mutual living room
I’m sure I would have screamed.
Molly Fisk: Hunter’s Moon
Mid-December, dusk, and the sky slips down the rungs of its blue ladder into indigo. A late-quarter moon hangs in the air above the ridge like a broken plate and … Continue reading
Molly Fisk: Deportee
Last week someone in our town ran a stop sign. Well, probably 47 people ran stop signs, but only one resulted in the threat of imminent deportation to the Grand … Continue reading
Molly Fisk: American Riddle
When you can’t figure out how to stop the war in Iraq, much less how to make enough money to pay your mortgage, moving the hundred and eighty dollars from … Continue reading
Molly Fisk: Wealth Measured in Persimmons
Despite my best efforts, I’m a pioneer-woman-manque: I want to be Laura Ingalls Wilder, but I don’t have the stamina for it. I let kale and beet greens get fuzzy … Continue reading
Molly Fisk: The October Garden
If you were zinnia, still bright in the October garden, and I the last orange cosmos. If you were catmint blue draping yourself over the cinder block wall and I … Continue reading
Molly Fisk: A Brief for the Defense
The other night I was eating dinner with some friends and the conversation turned, as it does these days, toward the coming apocalypse. There was some talk about Victory Gardens, … Continue reading
