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I am from the smell of new mown grass, and the sticky humid air of a Virginia summer;also--the sound of shovels scraping bare ground after a snow storm, maybe heralding that school is closed due to the weather. I am from days and seasons of ordinary. Consistent....
I open my calendar to enter an appointment, and 2025 stares back at me. How did that number get so big? Yesterday it was just 2009. In the intervening years, my deceased husband has slipped away—not gone, mind you, but not immediately at hand. Still, when I tell...
I first saw him the day I moved to town. I had driven from Hartford with a last carload of my belongings—boxes crammed with God-knows-what, a basket of unwashed laundry. I was reeling from job hunting, a sour breakup, the sale of one house and the purchase...
Where am I in this summer of disorientation, of forgetfulness and recovery, of humidity and surprise? Summer smells of sidewalks, wet pavement, morning condensation on blueberries for sale at farmstands, and grass that wets my sandaled feet in the mornings of days...
Time Change To steal some morning light the way we do to give to afternoon, you’d think we had a need to twist our only globe askew, not violently so, but just a tad. The Wish to Want The wish to want to clear the attic gnaws at pleasures of the hour. I...
I seek it along the shore. It jingles brightly in my pocket. I store it in a jar on the shelf where it glows like a light from behind a closed curtain. I taste it on my morning toast, glimpse its flicker past the window pane, listen to its laughter in the rain, drink...
At 5:05 am, my dad put on a soft white cotton shirt, his suit, and a good silk tie. Over his big balding head he pulled his second best Stetson fedora. Then he went out into the frigid pre-dawn darkness to walk a block for coffee and toast. It was useless to try to...
John Corbett is a life coach as well as a writer of fiction. If you read his fiction, you will learn to live your best life. His life guide, "Letting Go, Letting Great" may be one of the foremost guides to wealth and spiritual happiness ever written. He had a previous...
There’s a video online from the San Diego Zoo Safari Park, showing five African elephants onMonday morning April 14, 2025 when a 5.2 earthquake strikes, shaking the earth under theirfeet. Feeling the tremors (like the vibrations of animals running), they sense...
Our shoulders shaken,
we awaken from slumber—
it’s midnight. Daddy
disentangles us from dreams
and wraps us in warm clothing.
When the hawk appears on the plump, squat shrub, most often I soon hear William open the front door to our house. He always finds no one there. “It was you, wasn’t it,” he’ll say to me. *** On Thursday, February 24th 2022, Russia...
Trading lies about our earliest memories, my mind rewinds to 1987 when I was young and fragile but too naive for a bad girl to be living alone in Hollywood. You were there too, of course. I wonder what lies you will trade back with me. A series of calamitous events...
It’s ok, you can make fun of my Dodge. You’re probably just jealous. I know you want it, and you can have it. Sure, it’s over 30 years old, but this was my dad’s car. If anyone knew how to keep a car running, it was my dad. After I was grown and out of the house, he...
a Novembersilver & gold,shimmers & echoeson the barkof a sturdy Tupeloreadying for sleep & sugar makingon the hill of the sepia river. While the old men prepare to kill,a small insectdressed in lemon pollen,alights on the last wildSeptember rose, almost...
Surely you know the feeling
today, & open the door,
step out to the sunlight in your eyes
your hair uncombed, everything thick,
the chair damp from last night’s rain
your feet immediately you,
half-way back in your body
as you return from sleep,
& knowing that
you’ll miss this, afterward.
Auntie Shirley, my Uncle David’s wife, was a pediatric nurse from her twenties until the late1990s when she retired. Once she told me that she loved to watch healthy children at play, inparks and playgrounds, at pools and lakes and beaches, even in the streets, just...
I had loved my job as a special education public school teacher with a long, fulfilling careerthat lasted for more than three decades. I felt I had had a life well-lived, but I was ready toretire those almost six years ago…It is April 2015. Yesterday, I had twelve...
“I would like to be the air that inhabits you for a moment only.I would like to be that unnoticed and that necessary.”Margaret Atwood, Variation on the Word Sleep My mother rings a small, brass bell when she wakes up in the morning. When I put her tobed, I remind her...
My first thoughts of them aren’t with the craftbut with the atmosphere, with starting work:the optimism of the summer sun,the early morning light before the taskof measuring and marking off begins …and then the redolence of sawing wood,the scent of cherry, poplar,...
Music takes me calmlyto its lair, rehearsesdark emotions, whetherthose of majesty orscents of love and asheswhere we grieve together. Phrases made from griefthrive in peace here. So, too,when the present fails memusic lends relief.Music: when I hear you,you, like...
My hands are an enlarged version of a lady’s hands that in Victorian literature might have been described as “long-fingered if nicely formed.” When I was younger I’d expected my fingers to become replicas of my mother’s when she was the age I am now–arthritic knuckles the size of small walnuts and nails professionally manicured like wizened apple dolls with bright red lips.
He’d played the organ at 7:30 Mass for as long as most of the other retirees could remember. When the small white man with thick white hair stopped showing up, there was no music for a while. The man’s friends explained, “His heart’s going. He’s 94, after all.” The priest found someone to play the piano, which nobody liked. He promised to keep looking for another organist.
Do not do as I did, one recent semi-tropical evening, high above the placid, flaccid, steamy dead-end shores of Lauderdale-By-The-Sea, and ask your assembled in-laws, gathered there from distant compass points to mourn the death of their father, if they have ever been...
A fanatic at the doorselling environmental salvationbegs for money at dinnertime. Not now, I say. Come back later.But my wife appears,morphs into a polite 80 year old widowand nodding, let’s the fanatic talkthough spaghetti is on the table.So, I eat alone in full...
A non-conformist nightingalelonged to be a great white whaleHe once had heard of Moby Dick,whose skin was white and very thick,whose blubber never turned to flab,in his pursuit of Old Ahab.So for this bird in South Tyrolthe ocean’s depths became his goal.Night after...
We inherited a roof garden, as well asThe ladder Hermes left behind afterHe’d invented escape, trapped only by memoryOf his invention of cunning and theft.After a fancy education had workedIts magic, he moved to California. The plants he planted bloomed all dayAnd...
Betweens | Stephanie Gibbs It is often reported that, deep in the woods, lurks a being so foreign and so forlorn, so passed over by evolution and by civilization, that all it can do is shake its shaggy head and bellow, bellow at...
The Pineapple ‘zine is an online publication sponsored by Gallery of Readers Press. Edited by Walker Resnick and Robin Barber, we accept submissions of short fiction, essays, poetry, and creative non-fiction.
Carol Edelstein established the Pineapple in the 1980’s as an occasional photocopied collection of work from the writers in her workshops and weekend retreats. In 2010,
Gallery of Readers grew into a non-profit foundation, and Stephanie Gibbs set up the website at www.galleryofreaders.org. The first online Pineapple ‘Zine was edited and maintained by Stephanie, as a print accompaniment to the recordings of Gallery readings posted on the website.
We are now pleased to resume publication of the Pineapple.
When you entrust work to us, we will acknowledge promptly, give your work careful consideration, and respond within a month or two. Please no hateful, pornographic, or violent stuff.
The Pineapple ‘zine is an online publication sponsored by Gallery of Readers Press. Edited by Walker Resnick and Robin Barber, we accept submissions of short fiction, essays, poetry, and creative non-fiction.
Carol Edelstein established the Pineapple in the 1980’s as an occasional photocopied collection of work from the writers in her workshops and weekend retreats. In 2010,
Gallery of Readers grew into a non-profit foundation, and Stephanie Gibbs set up the website at www.galleryofreaders.org. The first online Pineapple ‘Zine was edited and maintained by Stephanie, as a print accompaniment to the recordings of Gallery readings posted on the website.
We are now pleased to resume publication of the Pineapple.
When you entrust work to us, we will acknowledge promptly, give your work careful consideration, and respond within a month or two. Please no hateful, pornographic, or violent stuff.
I am from the smell of new mown grass, and the sticky humid air of a Virginia summer;also--the sound of shovels scraping bare ground after a snow storm, maybe heralding that school is closed due to the weather. I am from days and seasons of ordinary. Consistent....
I open my calendar to enter an appointment, and 2025 stares back at me. How did that number get so big? Yesterday it was just 2009. In the intervening years, my deceased husband has slipped away—not gone, mind you, but not immediately at hand. Still, when I tell...
I first saw him the day I moved to town. I had driven from Hartford with a last carload of my belongings—boxes crammed with God-knows-what, a basket of unwashed laundry. I was reeling from job hunting, a sour breakup, the sale of one house and the purchase...
Where am I in this summer of disorientation, of forgetfulness and recovery, of humidity and surprise? Summer smells of sidewalks, wet pavement, morning condensation on blueberries for sale at farmstands, and grass that wets my sandaled feet in the mornings of days...
Time Change To steal some morning light the way we do to give to afternoon, you’d think we had a need to twist our only globe askew, not violently so, but just a tad. The Wish to Want The wish to want to clear the attic gnaws at pleasures of the hour. I...
I seek it along the shore. It jingles brightly in my pocket. I store it in a jar on the shelf where it glows like a light from behind a closed curtain. I taste it on my morning toast, glimpse its flicker past the window pane, listen to its laughter in the rain, drink...
At 5:05 am, my dad put on a soft white cotton shirt, his suit, and a good silk tie. Over his big balding head he pulled his second best Stetson fedora. Then he went out into the frigid pre-dawn darkness to walk a block for coffee and toast. It was useless to try to...
John Corbett is a life coach as well as a writer of fiction. If you read his fiction, you will learn to live your best life. His life guide, "Letting Go, Letting Great" may be one of the foremost guides to wealth and spiritual happiness ever written. He had a previous...
There’s a video online from the San Diego Zoo Safari Park, showing five African elephants onMonday morning April 14, 2025 when a 5.2 earthquake strikes, shaking the earth under theirfeet. Feeling the tremors (like the vibrations of animals running), they sense...
Our shoulders shaken,
we awaken from slumber—
it’s midnight. Daddy
disentangles us from dreams
and wraps us in warm clothing.
When the hawk appears on the plump, squat shrub, most often I soon hear William open the front door to our house. He always finds no one there. “It was you, wasn’t it,” he’ll say to me. *** On Thursday, February 24th 2022, Russia...
Trading lies about our earliest memories, my mind rewinds to 1987 when I was young and fragile but too naive for a bad girl to be living alone in Hollywood. You were there too, of course. I wonder what lies you will trade back with me. A series of calamitous events...
It’s ok, you can make fun of my Dodge. You’re probably just jealous. I know you want it, and you can have it. Sure, it’s over 30 years old, but this was my dad’s car. If anyone knew how to keep a car running, it was my dad. After I was grown and out of the house, he...
a Novembersilver & gold,shimmers & echoeson the barkof a sturdy Tupeloreadying for sleep & sugar makingon the hill of the sepia river. While the old men prepare to kill,a small insectdressed in lemon pollen,alights on the last wildSeptember rose, almost...
Surely you know the feeling
today, & open the door,
step out to the sunlight in your eyes
your hair uncombed, everything thick,
the chair damp from last night’s rain
your feet immediately you,
half-way back in your body
as you return from sleep,
& knowing that
you’ll miss this, afterward.
Auntie Shirley, my Uncle David’s wife, was a pediatric nurse from her twenties until the late1990s when she retired. Once she told me that she loved to watch healthy children at play, inparks and playgrounds, at pools and lakes and beaches, even in the streets, just...
I had loved my job as a special education public school teacher with a long, fulfilling careerthat lasted for more than three decades. I felt I had had a life well-lived, but I was ready toretire those almost six years ago…It is April 2015. Yesterday, I had twelve...
“I would like to be the air that inhabits you for a moment only.I would like to be that unnoticed and that necessary.”Margaret Atwood, Variation on the Word Sleep My mother rings a small, brass bell when she wakes up in the morning. When I put her tobed, I remind her...
My first thoughts of them aren’t with the craftbut with the atmosphere, with starting work:the optimism of the summer sun,the early morning light before the taskof measuring and marking off begins …and then the redolence of sawing wood,the scent of cherry, poplar,...
Music takes me calmlyto its lair, rehearsesdark emotions, whetherthose of majesty orscents of love and asheswhere we grieve together. Phrases made from griefthrive in peace here. So, too,when the present fails memusic lends relief.Music: when I hear you,you, like...
My hands are an enlarged version of a lady’s hands that in Victorian literature might have been described as “long-fingered if nicely formed.” When I was younger I’d expected my fingers to become replicas of my mother’s when she was the age I am now–arthritic knuckles the size of small walnuts and nails professionally manicured like wizened apple dolls with bright red lips.
He’d played the organ at 7:30 Mass for as long as most of the other retirees could remember. When the small white man with thick white hair stopped showing up, there was no music for a while. The man’s friends explained, “His heart’s going. He’s 94, after all.” The priest found someone to play the piano, which nobody liked. He promised to keep looking for another organist.
Do not do as I did, one recent semi-tropical evening, high above the placid, flaccid, steamy dead-end shores of Lauderdale-By-The-Sea, and ask your assembled in-laws, gathered there from distant compass points to mourn the death of their father, if they have ever been...
A fanatic at the doorselling environmental salvationbegs for money at dinnertime. Not now, I say. Come back later.But my wife appears,morphs into a polite 80 year old widowand nodding, let’s the fanatic talkthough spaghetti is on the table.So, I eat alone in full...
A non-conformist nightingalelonged to be a great white whaleHe once had heard of Moby Dick,whose skin was white and very thick,whose blubber never turned to flab,in his pursuit of Old Ahab.So for this bird in South Tyrolthe ocean’s depths became his goal.Night after...
We inherited a roof garden, as well asThe ladder Hermes left behind afterHe’d invented escape, trapped only by memoryOf his invention of cunning and theft.After a fancy education had workedIts magic, he moved to California. The plants he planted bloomed all dayAnd...
Betweens | Stephanie Gibbs It is often reported that, deep in the woods, lurks a being so foreign and so forlorn, so passed over by evolution and by civilization, that all it can do is shake its shaggy head and bellow, bellow at...