I am so happy to present this exciting project by the one and only sister team, my daughters, Bridget and Riana Johnson! Please enjoy the first Potato Taco Film, a stop motion animated short. August 28, 2020 "We are so excited to officially premier our first of SIX short films, “Girls in Serapes, or How... Continue Reading →
for Flo Hart Arthritis I remember watching my dear friend Jimmy’s mother, Flo, scoot, literally, or squiggle, like a fish out of water, across the kitchen floor to travel from one cabinet to the next gathering what she needed to put dinner together. I offered to help, and she thanked me with her always... Continue Reading →
Or Three Poems and a Funeral So it is October. The month when the veil between this life and after is its thinnest. And the clouds are their most dramatic. And the colors. And so many friends have recently lost parents. Loved ones. And so I offer this. Three poems, and accompanying blather looking at death.... Continue Reading →
Steamer Trunk The gap in the ground yawned like a toothless mouth waiting for teeth waiting for the box of her bones aligned and perfumed like sundries in a steamer trunk. Her death certificate stamped like a passport in her pocket currency exchanged and shiny new pennies leveled on her closed eyes ready to go. How... Continue Reading →
Or the Importance of TherMOMeters When I was a girl, if I went to my mom in the morning on a school day and said, “I don’t feel good,” she had a routine response. She would first feel my forehead with that hand of hers. It seemed to me then, and does still now, that... Continue Reading →
Because June, for all of its weddings and graduations and summer celebrations, is also, for so many I know, a month to remember those we have lost, I decided to share an old favorite poem of mine. Both of my parents died in June. A dear friend's deceased son was born in June. There are... Continue Reading →
Poetry Month, Poem A Day, No. 17 The Twelfth Fret for Sandra The bridge was wide enough only for one dog and me, it crosses an arroyo chiseled out of the red earth like a wound needing sutures and waiting for the flood. “D’ya see those concrete blocks?” a hiker asked waiting for me to... Continue Reading →
My mother claimed, not a boast mind you, a claim, that I was independent before I was born. She may have also used the words ‘stubborn,’ ‘brat,’ or 'bold,' but mostly she referred to me as independent. Surely it was no surprise when at 21 I went west. It was always a surprise that I... Continue Reading →
As we approach the fiftieth anniversary of the '67 Detroit Race Riots, I thought I would share a short story set in Detroit at that time. "This is the end, beautiful friendThis is the end, my only friend, the end."*(Jim Morrison) Perfect Sanctuary I stopped telling the truth to our parish priests in 1967, the... Continue Reading →
for Kay McKay I wondered today how long it takes for someone to become an angel. Is it instantaneous? Now you're dead, now you're an angel? Is there a waiting period? A series of hoops and steps and paperwork to get desensitized from life and ready for death. Like an immigration process? A job interview? Is... Continue Reading →
pocket poet 