To All My Readers, you are my family

My big window parading all my friends so close by, yet no one tattled or told me today was the day they would die. Yesterday, the sun was a bit worn-out, and some rain cried while wetting the earth, but still, I saw the new Creeping Jenny’s annual birth. My eyes don’t work well […]

My New Prose “slumbering Savannah” Now On Masticadoresindia

The swamp claws its way through the mud. Water moccasin waking late in the winter’s artful sun. Hiding in the putrid belly of the forsaken shade of the brown-haired trees, he lay gazing. He sees in black and white. Stalking prey with a proud skinny neck and blockish head, he hunts. Choctaw child, feet raw […]

My Short Story “Booze And Bobcats” Now On MasticadoresIndia

Anguish threw her vile smell around the house like a cat who sprays the coffee pot. Strings of tension gave rise to erect hair follicles like they always did when something horrible was about to happen. Mom and my little sister Rosa were nowhere to be found. Dad’s car was parked in the back of […]

Live on MasticadoresIndia – “Secret behind my dad’s death”

Strange questions were bouncing off the wall when I said goodbye to Dad. As I lay, the phone down, my intuition was flexing its head like a water moccasin. I sensed a myriad of harsh realities lurking like monsters in dense fog. It was a simple lung biopsy, and they had stabilized his blood pressure, […]

Lisa Tomey Anthology – Social Justice Inks

Social Justice Inks is a highly formidable book about many prominent issues related to Social Injustice in our world. I am so grateful to have three pieces in this thought-provoking book. When I listened to a video that Lisa Tomey held with some of the writers included in this book, I was brought to tears. […]

My new poem “gossip” now live on masticadoresIndia

Gossip sundry whispers flutter like silky snow bending, twisting around rapt ear perching amid folks ripe for evil Please go to MasticadoresIndia to read the rest of this piece. Follow and subscribe to MasticadoresIndia if you like great stories and poetry. I heard gossip explained this way to me a long time ago, and it […]

My new poem live on The Edge of Humanity “High price”

Arising from the loamy soil and red clay emits the realm of cotton and tobacco. Their breaths are a land of drudgery where drops of scarlet seep from hands that pick the whites of her thorny eyes. Growing in fields of lost magnolias and gardenias adrift, where scentless trees play jazz for fairies and whippoorwills. […]

Live On Spillwords Press NYC – My new poem “From love to Hollowed Tree”

lightning striking emotions I can no longer contain burning my skin with your scathing looks for you have found another smelling her lilac perfume burns my nose and cuts ridges on my hips how will your fingers forget the heavenly world you traced on my body your hands drew life softly in circles, birthing spasms […]

Bowl of Sorrow

my eyes swollen, arousing now, the floor vanisheshobby horse clings to a ceiling that does not existfragments of skin reek of fear, never ceasingmy heart is pounding, breathless for airbecoming that boney, big-eared childyou are no longer kind to mepretending not to seefor I am cagednot free

Disappearing Slowly

Photography by Gabriel Matula – Unsplash – Poem by Joni Caggiano on Saturday, June 5, 2021 Shall I rise today and put on my face? If so, which face shall I paint. I suffer like a lamp whose light no longer shines or a piano whose keys are missing, yet still strains to coerce a […]