By Lee Erickson As a child, my mom warned me never to trust men in cowboy hats.

by Lee Erickson Love me conditionally. Break me into pieces small enough to fit inside your shrinking world. Make me earn my place, over...

by Lee Erickson Don’t say it. Don’t feel it. (breathe) It feels good, yet it can’t feel good yet. Look around. The staff meeting is done....

by Lee Erickson Unsent greeting cards, empty beer cans, shipping labels peeled too soon— and candles, unburned, unchosen, stacked,...

by Lee Erickson   I’m waiting for my mom to die.                    (Waiting I’m waiting for my husband to die....

By Lee Erickson My brother had to not remember us at the end because he needed all his energy to focus on his breathing. The struggling...

by Lee Erickson I am bi-cultural, raised with my feet planted firmly in soils of shame and denial, roots tangled in silence, branches...

by Lee Erickson It took four of them to hold her down, and the white jackets they wore shimmered in the fluorescent hospital light as...

by Lee Erickson Ann Sathers. Boystown, Chicago, 1997 I rise early on a winter Saturday, alone, the Red Line rattles north. Last...

by Lee Erickson By seventh grade, he had mastered the art of vanishing. A sixth sense honed from necessity, an instinct to anticipate...

By Lee Erickson After my dad died, I started walking. Early morning. Every season, every year. A triangle of sadness I traced—unchanged,...

by Lee Erickson   Through the open window, voices floated— "He looks better," someone murmured, words hovering,
 barely two months since
...

by Lee Erickson   A man was murdered in my city last Monday   and my Red America Peony   (the supreme of the red, single bloom peonies...