I’ve always thought of my hands as my favorite body part, the most reliable tools through which to express myself Drawing, painting, centering a mound of slippery clay on the potter’s wheel, carving the clay when it had dried to leather hard. Tossing the clay scraps back into water and kneading them back into pliable…

I used to be fearless down to my core I would move toward what scared me so I wouldn’t be scared anymore. I used to be fearless training on the mat attacking my sensei, quick as a cat. Thrown away into a joist-shuddering fall, I’d bounce back to my feet like a super ball. I…

2012 on-campus. A crowded claustrophobic classroom. The horse in me wanted to bolt. English 101 discussing “Shame” from Dick Gregory’s autobiography Nigger. (A book the book banners will surely ban) A place kicker on a football scholarship groaned in protest.  “Why do we have to read this stuff? Aren’t we done with racism in this…

Like my father jingling the change in his pocket, I used to always be ahead of time, pushing the timing so that I could avert bad timing and arrive with time to spare. Time was pressure, cause for anxiety. To be late was to break your word. But for my mother, time was more fluid,…

I look for Shadow in the shadows, her blue gray fur, bold yellow eyes, and the scar behind her right ear. I miss our catnaps on the couch, her paws kneading my belly, her face burrowing into mine, the tickle of her long white whiskers. I miss her sideways arched-back hop of delight and how…

The Earth is rising up into the sky spinning, howling, whistling, sandblasting, snapping branches that have not yet learned to bend, rattling nests, battering birds, desiccating what it what is already dry from drought, obscuring the mountains surrounding us and generating crazy-making static. Earth on the wind finds fire, screams life into the blaze, belches…

Bullying wind scouring snarling screaming whistling whining shrieking through loose rattling windowpanes. The gusts grate on my nerves, invade my sinuses and tear ducts The wind blows as if entitled to be rude; grit covers my desk, books, papers, and laptop. It relentlessly scours the tenderness of spring, drives her back underground forces baby birds…

The combo punch of craniotomy, six weeks of radiation, and chemotherapy did a number on my hair so one day I decided to go to the local barbershop in Colorado Springs and have my head shaved. Henry and I had discovered a repurposed elementary school north of Penrose Hospital. The classrooms had been turned into…

A short walk today until my knees said enough. It’s too much pressure and I’d much rather sleep. My feet found all the bumps, my body’s not aligned. How I long to be fluid 2. as the dancers are fluid bending deep in their knees hips and backs aligned, gravity distributed, pressure turned sinuous, bumps…

From the serpentine river and the grassy plains where the horses grazed, the cave in the sandstone cliffs looked like a mouth, a horizontal gash of a mouth that had lost its full lips. We called it the grandmother’s mouth and imagined other features in the sandstone as wrinkled farsighted eyes, a long nose, and…