Claudia Gary

Lentils and barley,water and salt,split peas and pasta—pure to a fault—stir until clouded,season to taste,boil and then simmer,nothing to waste.Greens can be added.Time’s on a loop.Towers have toppledinto the soup.Cauldron of comfortserved with warm hands,this is a recipecrisis demands. . . . . Continue Reading »

Some days her mind begins to reappear. Today you feel her halting fingers trace, along your skull, the curls she used to fear, although she raised you in a gentler place than where her classmates called her “kinky head” or worse. She thinks she’s cringing by her locker, until she . . . . Continue Reading »

i.m. Neil Armstrong “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind” —Neil Armstrong, 1969 “Software finds missing ‘a’ in Armstrong’s moon quote” —Associated Press, Oct. 2, 2006 Since Peter Ford has clarified the sound once uttered on the moon but dropped in . . . . Continue Reading »

Far from where your sharp glance and mine could meet, a laundromat on Rue des Pyrenées was where I learned to fold a fitted sheet” which, in a different language, seemed OK. The parisienne who showed me how to place my hands in the sheet’s corners, shake it straight, then bring both palms . . . . Continue Reading »

If no one on the ground or ocean was injured when he turned to a noun what was the loss? His wings were waxen. He should have known the risk but wanted always to be a verb: pure motion, wind on his chest as none could have known, distance and gravity forsaken. Simply to be a verb he mounted higher . . . . Continue Reading »