Six minutes outside of Chartres, a family is renting their home to college students taking what they call une année de fossé. The mother of the family, who studied English during her own bright college years, translates to her husband – une année sabbatique is what they mean to say. Only one of the students, Emily, has learned the correct… Read more →
They’ve torn from the back pasture whole acres. I hear the machines working at my homecoming down the long driveway. Invisible behind the barn I hear them; the felling reminds me of years spent riding the tree line looking for downed fence, trees wobbled in hard wind, brought down in a hulk of splintered trunk—but these, unnaturally wasted, splinter by… Read more →
Light rays pierce the dense clouds. They crack open oozing daybreak. Seagulls swing back and forth in the air as vines. Glazed in shades of peach, thoughts contort into origami birds They perch at the edge of daydreams. Inspiration rushes in and dissipates with the white tide and movement of the sun toward the work day. Ahead, a broken kite… Read more →
I learn the blueberries I am eating this morning were flown in from Chile. They have a dusting of white on them and are firm, some with little nubs of green where they’ve been picked by someone I will never meet. Their origin is found on the container, but also in the article I have read about other fruits from… Read more →
we’ve been signing across a wide expanse of green as questions cast shadows while we mouth hopes slowly accompanied by clarifying gestures with twinkling understanding emerging or fading overhead
When my mother was a girl during the Depression, the circus rolled into her prairie town on slow trains, then set up on the fairgrounds at the edge of town. She loved the big tent, the smell of sawdust. My circus? At the cement civic center downtown. I was not captivated by the clown cars, the balloons, the woman riding… Read more →
Over a year she chronicles in two dimensions, names, and smudges : Bramble Cay Melomys little rat, you were her first, mosaic-tailed, indigenous to your Torres Strait, and — “dubious honour”— first Australian species victim to rising seas, she traces your erasure Bushwren xenicus longpipes, little wren, the second, each feather’s hairlike threads, curled claw, startle of white brow, her… Read more →
We were coming home from piano when I lurched from the backseat to grab mom’s shoulder, pointing with my other hand to the usually staid, six feet of hibiscus outside her car window, my sister’s front-seat head joining ours in rotation until six, dilating pupils landed on the massive bee swarm near the bush’s top. I remember it looking like… Read more →
For the mangrove to form, water must move slowly, its patience merging sediments, tangling roots into forest, so shrubs and trees, like circus stilt walkers, sway atop the watery surface, and vertical branches form flowered-finger networks, nature’s prophecy. How else can police in the Sundarbans’ plush canopies, its acres and acres of undergrowth, make out the poachers they will slaughter… Read more →
I sign my initials for the man who arriveshe says all the proof is there. Bark beetlesand brown bristles, unshed. He takes the tree down. First the boughsover the street. The leader and the crown.So many branches falling. Like the boy who hanged himself with a leather belt.Nothing above the ladder or the hook.I was like that. Almost a hole… Read more →