(Monday, September 03, 2007: for Alan R.) by Clarinda Harriss How did we get here?We should’ve exited right after the Bay Bridge.This is not the way we came.One minute a flat silver twilight on water,suddenly what looks like a downtown intersection.How did we get hereand what are those blue lights, a road-block?Look! a cop’s crouching to chalk-line … [Read more...] about Labor Day: Home from the Shore.
Clarinda Harriss
Hot Water Piggie Blues
by Clarinda Harriss I. Driving to Warm Places When Melissa used four digits of a five-digit windfall to buy a hot tub, T. James called her a moron. What Melissa and T. James had most in common was a belief that each was missing an important part of his or her brain. “You could’ve bought a car to replace your pathetic … [Read more...] about Hot Water Piggie Blues
Bone to Bone
by Clarinda Harriss (There's a two-goddess back-story to "Bone to Bone." One goddess was my "second mother," Callie Taylor, a tall, glamorous-looking Black woman, one of the few unconditionally loving people in my life. She took care of me and cooked -- divinely -- for my parents for the first twelve years of my life. Callie was the subject … [Read more...] about Bone to Bone
Memo to the Children
by Clarinda Harriss The last time I saw your grandmother cry was a month before she died. Tears softened the black pencil under her undimmed eyes for the Nigerian woman about to be stoned to death for bearing somebody’s child. The black running down her cheeks seemed to say it could be you, or me, about to die. She’d marked the page … [Read more...] about Memo to the Children
Poetry Makes the Cut
by Clarinda Harriss After Writers’ Club Meetings at the Jessup PrisonClarinda Harriss, The Night Parrot, Salmon Publishing, Galway, 1988 After a night in that cool green maze I expect everyone to be very polite for days after the writing class I recall the guards’civility and more the courtly residents … [Read more...] about Poetry Makes the Cut