A band I love released another album. I watch them on YouTube while walking my dog. My neighbor Bob appears ashen in a second-floor window framed in waning yellow light. Just home from work, I walk our golden doodle in darkness. Streetlights make long shadows of us. In the video the band looks haggard, older, strung out maybe. They mock… Read more →
Raptors ride the thermals above Dakota. Beyond them, the sun appears closer, colder. Everything warm escapes, returns. One-hundred nations assemble in congress, this time for water, where water is life. And I know this isn’t my song to sing, but I wonder what god saves grace for hunters. Water cannons, fire hoses, nunc pro tunc. this land, once yours, was… Read more →
You just met. You barely know each other. You take your 1996 Isuzu Rodeo and drive south from the Twin Cities. You listen to the forecast on the radio—an April blizzard—and feel like you’re getting away with something, or at least from something. Bullet dodged. By the time the scenery is all sky, no scrapers, you’re already in love, the… Read more →
Worn wooden bench seats warmed by summer afternoon heat. Platform with scuffed yellow safety lines. Small shade from the platform roof forming a dark rectangle parallel to the mountains of the Cinque Terre on one side, the Mediterranean Sea on the other. The long wait. Train tracks, two, each north-south. Each entering or exiting a tunnel. Fences separate railway travelers… Read more →
You arrived without a chin. You were wearing someone else’s eyes. Tiny creature in a tar basket, I wanted so bad for you to be mine. – That summer the river was almost blue, the back stream teeming with fish. For months I returned you dutifully to the water where you lived. But in August, the frogs finally chirruped again… Read more →
I wrote to you, requesting a reference letter for admission into your MFA program. My creative writing mentor at the college did not give me a reference letter. I really liked you. I thought you had the prettiest blue green eyes. I was encouraged to apply and see what happens. By the time you agreed that I could copy-and-paste multiple… Read more →
In the box is her pregnancy, it doesn’t look like most women’s. Though it weighs 8 pounds, 5 ounces, a healthy heft and size. She stands before the UPS man and the locked dispenser holding other people’s secrets destined for the same shredder. She does not look at him, nor he at her. The man grabs the contents at the… Read more →
This morning I watched birds – a whole flock had gathered in our yard, digging through leaves we still haven’t raked, scraping up wet moss with their beaks. It’s an early spring and they are hungry. Inside for once things are quiet and I am hungry too: I drink too much coffee, I open wine at noon. In my belly… Read more →