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PoemsSONNET: WAITING FOR WILLIAM BLAKE AT THE PRICE CHOPPER The automatic doors swing wide and hum To the Bee Gees’ “Stayin’ Alive.” I loaf under the doors’ red eye, struck dumb By ugly thoughts of what just might survive. Two quarters will get me a cheap surprise, A tiny capsule crammed inside a metaphor; Instructions included: Drop the prize In water. Wait for giant dinosaur… Of knowledge passed down from generation To generation. What were once books Are now these capsules measured out Like Flintstone Vitamins, each orange one, An act of faith that pounds our blood with hope, A spiritual gesture against our doubt. SACK OF POTATOES Natalie's two hands, small as poplar leaves and yellow from play, press against my cheeks. She turns my face away and whispers: "I need to tell you a question." Waits to see if I hear and leans into my ear to say, "Potato." It is already late autumn and we dug the potatoes up weeks ago. The kill frost came and went the morning after the snow geese, alarmed at the sudden cold, came through winging and honking south. "Mashed potatoes," I answer, and she grins like an alchemist. Just out the back door are spare fields, sinewy as the tendons pulled taut across my shoulders when lugging her, my sack of potatoes, a weight too light to deny but too heavy a burden to hoist great distances. Higgledy piggledy Natalie drapes secure as the red-winged black bird preening in the poplar. Above, velvety cloudlets inspire the frothiness that leads her to shrewdly assert, "Marshmallow Fluff." |
Selected Works1. Nonfiction
America Dreaming
How Youth Changed America
"Phenomenal."–Howard Zinn "Excellent."–New York Times Book Review Harlem Stomp! A Cultural History of the Harlem Renaissance
“Harlem Stomp! is a wonderous new book: it celebrates a time, a place, an energy, and a people who refused to be held back and so they created a culture the entire world is still reeling from.” --George C. Wolfe, writer, director, and producer of the Public Theater, NYC 2. Fiction
A Brush with Napoleon
A seventeen-year-old is plucked out of the Grande Armee to sit in place of Napoleon for a portrait of the Emperor by the artist David. Casa Azul
"I felt like a kid reading every word on the page! I liked the strains of "magic realism" coming through in Frida's house! Children will relate to this very much! The story is charming and reads like a thriller." –Margarita Aguilar, Assisant Curator, El Museo del Barrio 3. Poetry
Dave the Potter
A picturebook poem describing the life of the slave potter Dave. Contemporary Poetry of New England
“Contemporary Poetry of New England offers a vivid portrait of a region, its colors and smells, its physical and emotional textures, and the people…. It presents a range of poets, few of whom would call themselves a “region poet,” although each has taken to heart in a private way Frost’s haunting dictum: ‘Locality gives art.’” --from the Introduction 4. Middle Grade Series
Xtreme Mysteries
These kids love extreme sports--snowboarding, skateboarding, rock climbing, wake boarding--and are ready to fight when the right to do their sport is threatened. |
