Tanka Prose

The wandering woman curls her toes into the sand as a wave cascades over her feet. The cool, frothy wash provides an interesting contrast to the heat of the merciless…

a cloud basks in dawn's first rays . . . the marsh is quiet but for the wail of a loon  Gabe always had an artist's bent. Early on, he was a builder, a civil engineer. Whole cities with houses, tunnels, and…

Everyone knows Dino was the last real dinosaur—the Jurassic Park superstars, just digital facsimiles conceived to honor his existence. My eight-or-so-inch-high brontosaurus from Sinclair Oil's plastic molding machine—once warm to…

We are vanishing from the earth, yet I cannot think we are uselessor else Usen would not have created us. He created all tribes of menand certainly had a righteous…

along the bywayto adulthoodan apple tree bloomed . . .now I pick its fruitwith weathered hands I’m in rows of corn, running my fingers through the rustling leaves, the scent…

It's hard to believe you're not here. Seems like yesterday we were laughing at stupid jokes, not taking life too seriously. I found an old picture of you in a…

I’m floating in an uncharted region of my mind. There are no faces in the portraits on these walls. Hitchhiked here from the medulla oblongata. Found myself sloshing it up…

a paintingof a boyplaying on the beach . . .the sea now swollenswallowing the man Monsieur Beaufont, an aristocrat from Paris, is throwing a housewarming party. He’s just migrated to…

The walking man studies the footprints he’s made in the first snow of this year, footprints meandering back through time, back through time with his thoughts. There he finds a…

Polly loves to grow things. She has a delicious garden full of fruits, herbs, vegetables, tubers, and flowers. I often wonder what it would be like to be back there…