Reading – Kathy Boles-Turner

First Week of July Writing, Reading, Joining, Quitting

Featured image by Tonya Boles

Reading In My Future Haven

Imagine a room with pine plank floors and inset shelves painted a lush white, nine feet tall, three feet wide, six inches apart, running the length of a room on either side of a broad picture window. On each shelf there are of course well used books from every era of modern literature, spines of […]

by Kathy Boles-Turner

There There, by Tommy Orange

So many reviews call this book shattering, I would call it just the opposite. This story picks up the broken shards of lost stories and puts together a contemporary explanation of what happens when the past is forgotten just enough to haunt. With multiple characters speaking across the city of Oakland, Tommy Orange weaves together […]

by Kathy Boles-Turner

APAD: Fox and Furnace, by William Wright

1. Tonight so clear the Milky Way shimmers like a stoked furnace, the scattered stars like rogue embers deep in a bloomery. I recall my father’s face, the orange light of the wood stove imprisoned in his skin, his eyes trapping the firelight until he’d lobbed and poked the pine logs, then shut and latched […]

by Kathy Boles-Turner

APAD: Proof of Poetry, by Tom Sleigh

I wanted first to end up as a drunk in the gutter and in my twenties I almost ended up there— and then as an alternative to vodka, to live alone like a hermit philosopher and court the extreme poverty that I suspected lay in store for me anyway— and then there were the years […]

by Kathy Boles-Turner

APAD: Empty House, by James Kimbrell

Every few nights I walk over here, screen door opened And springless, leaves now up to the second step, No one watching out the window but me with my elbows On the ledge, my face staring back at my staring in. What if, all along, I’d been waiting in there? What if The bird left […]

by Kathy Boles-Turner

APAD: Be Nobody’s Darling, by Alice Walker

Be nobody’s darling; Be an outcast. Take the contradictions Of your life And wrap around You like a shawl, To parry stones To keep you warm. Watch the people succumb To madness With ample cheer; Let them look askance at you And you askance reply. Be an outcast; Be pleased to walk alone (Uncool) Or […]

by Kathy Boles-Turner

APAD: This Rain, by Jenna Butler

This Rain brings with it the scent of rain-soaked lilac, lemon lily. Bruised skirts of thunderclouds drop their wet hems over this prairie. It rains and the ditches brim, rains and the water rises like ire amongst the willows. What we say and do not say. The heart incandescent, riverine with distance. *** lilt […]

by Kathy Boles-Turner

APAD: synesthesia after anesthesia, by Kathryn Kirkpatrick

waking up like a needle in a haystack afraid to be found and if found to make nothing more than a stitch in water but even so the unimaginable ripple might touch the tongue of a passing deer who has bent to drink so long and so deeply I forget my fear and become the […]

by Kathy Boles-Turner

APAD: Maggie Says There’s No Such Thing As Winter, by Janet McNally

If you believe in snow, you have to believe in water as it’s meant to be, loosed from clouds arranged like asphodel. Because that’s what it’s like to come back: a slow surfacing, memory spiraling away. You can sleep so long, whole seasons are forgotten like a hospital-room plaster, spidered with cracks in Portugal shapes. […]