Swimming
We swim through the living room toward the television while our mother watches reruns of Friends. She yells, “For shit’s sake, stop that, go outside!” But we don’t go outside. It’s the middle of the day, it’s 103 under the pines, and we’ve outgrown—by years—the small plastic pool Mom bought us with her egg money. Egg money buys everything we… Read more →
Hook
buy me a last drink something cold & neat take me through the lobby with the knowing lamps just lit pry me loose a stuck penny I’ll wipe my boots on your nagging doubt & later when you lace your shoes overtip the maid vanish like fog my fingers will invent you on hotel stationary crisp lined paper shoulders eyes… Read more →
Fischich
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 →
Logging
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 →
Mundane
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 →
Contemplating Distances
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 →
Lately
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
Captivity
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 →
Extinction Studies
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 →