#jack powers

They flew from Ireland for my brother’s wedding. Hugh packed his wool pants, three pairs of long underwear, three bottles of Jameson’s. Teresa, Granny’s sister, was wee beside him, red-cheeked, gray-haired. We had to lean in to decipher her bubbling brogue. Married late, they shared a kind of winking love that came after they’d learned to live without. Hugh, 70, fit from rowing out to his lobster…

Jack Powers Biography

Devil On Horseback (First Edition)

by

Dudley T. Ross

In her final painting, Alice Neel is eighty, nude, sitting on a blue striped chair, paint brush in her right hand, painting rag in her left. Her body at an angle accents her belly, the hunch in her back. A diagonal line divides the floor into orange and green. One foot rests in each. But her head turns to us, glasses on, as if to say, It’s just a fact of life, unflinching, despite breakdowns,…

She decided to tell the children after Thanksgiving dinner but was afraid she’d forget – afraid that early onset wasn’t early enough so she wrote each a note to say how she loved them. When the day arrived

she did remember and, once they’d scraped the pie plates clean, told them and Jenny cried and Dylan patted her arm and Lee Ann yelled that doctors don’t know everything. And Peter googled a list…

Bert always felt like a prop the way Kay fleshed out her stories with Bert said this. Bert did that – long before I met him. Soon he became a voice on the phone: deadpan. Is Kay there? Silence. Yes. More silence.

Can I speak to her? His ministry seemed to contradict Kay’s devoted atheism or maybe provided balance to the universe. He, always in black with white collar; she, in English teacher dress…

Put Down This Poem and Call Your Mother

It’s only now, four years gone that I see her clearly – not the mute and creaky shadow of her at the end, breath shallow, aides holding the phone to her ear as I read meaning in each hesitation. No, the real her. But I can’t hear her voice

mischievous as she fed raccoons in the backyard oak, or singing tinkle tinkle little star outside the bathroom door as Zak, then four, peed. Or asking the…