Author Adrienne Morris

May 18, 2022

A Haunted House of Dreams

You are attached to a mystical tangle of ribbons–other people’s dreams and desires. A flirtation. A wedding. Children. A funeral. And all over again. With blue eyes running along one thread, alcoholism another. Love is tangled in there too. This is my 3x great grandfather’s house. I want to burrow into the collapse to find […]

May 17, 2022

A Stolen Tombstone

Why would a person steal from a cemetery? At my favorite family resting spot in the middle of nowhere someone stole the headstone of a Civil War soldier who died of disease before seeing battle. It was early in the war, so his body was sent home. A couple in Florida found the headstone in […]

May 16, 2022

Pray for the Dead?

Do you think it’s morbid to pray for the dead? Do you think they can pray for us? I accept that I may have an active imagination and we can’t know for sure if visiting cemeteries brings us closer to our loved ones, but I feel it can. I visited one of my Civil War […]

May 14, 2022

O Solitude!

O Solitude! if I must with thee dwell, Let it not be among the jumbled heap Of murky buildings; climb with me the steep,— Nature’s observatory—whence the dell, Its flowery slopes, its river’s crystal swell, May seem a span; let me thy vigils keep ’Mongst boughs pavillion’d, where the deer’s swift leap Startles the wild […]

May 13, 2022

“Here Lies One Whose Name Was Writ in Water” John Keats

Tall and handsome I didn’t love him for his poetry. I didn’t love him at all in a romantic way though he had a habit of sending love letters to everyone he thought beautiful. He’d sent one to me just after a bike ride along the glittering reservoir. We were friends because we’d known each […]

May 3, 2022

Ode on a Grecian Urn by John Keats

Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness, Thou foster-child of silence and slow time, Sylvan historian, who canst thus express A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme: What leaf-fring’d legend haunts about thy shape Of deities or mortals, or of both, In Tempe or the dales of Arcady? What men or gods are these? What […]

May 2, 2022

A Writer’s Calling

You should not expect a return on your love. The idea that you deserve anything in life leads to disappointment. How many times must we suffer disappointment before we make peace with the idea that it’s a sorry part of life? It’s our lot. We expect so much from others and fine things from ourselves […]

April 26, 2022

Restoration of a Monument

“The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.” George Orwell In town squares dotted all over Upstate New York stand monuments to the sacrifices made by young men who fought and died in the Civil War — to end slavery. Yes, there. I said it. […]

April 21, 2022

A Masterpiece

“You’ll never guess what happened to me today! I was raped!” She said this gleefully. “But they gave me a shot in the leg so I don’t get HIV and a pill so I want to move on.” “But I thought you went off birth control because you wanted to make babies with Joe (fake […]

April 18, 2022

Adoption Madness (a brief fast forward)

M could be pregnant. Left to her own devices in the past we’ve found her dressed in wild princess outfits talking to herself in front of a neighbor’s farm on a blind curve in the road where people speed without thinking. At the village school she attended, she used to wear such outlandish outfits that […]