It wasn’t Thanksgiving that got me, the overflowing table where he wasn’t for the first time – my windshield not cleaned the paper trash not taken to the burn barrel – No. It was a practical three pack of flashlights that did me in, the kind of thing that men of my father’s age buy … More Fleet Farm Translations
At the end of the week we dragged our various brokenness west on highway 29, across the Mississippi river, through the tangled Cities and landed on a Minnesota lake encircled with plenty. Not quite the wilderness but at night you can still see the stars and the light shines in yellow parallellograms on thick green … More How to Carry Your Broken Bones
Sidewalk slabs are replaced out of order one by one, year upon year, a broken football player’s teeth spit into the grass; the cool April sun genuflects and shines through the bright green blades, the shy ruffed hyacinth hiding behind the downspout. I see you there, says the yawning sun. I see your beauty. A … More A Reading from the Book of Sidewalk
it’s the ritual of the envelope/ of the return address/ of your address/ of the stamp the card I will send to you is a time traveler, you I hold like a tiny beacon for a moment while outside darkness like a stray cat curls around the house and Sheila wrapped in a parka dispenses … More Decembering
when the rain lessened we hauled our plastic Adirondack chairs in one hand and Old Fashioneds in the other down to the river, down to the dock, and sat there – the dock or the river just beneath the current lifting the water through the slats soaking our shorts from below while the rain continued … More Rain on the River
Perhaps the news alit for just a second – tiny talons rest on a bough in the lovely dark pines, the branch barely dipping, the chickadee no heavier than your cigar; did you forget it anon, or did the bomb of it drop to the earth leaving its song in the air before you even … More Birds and Strangers
These steady lake waves come near like a dog teasing with a stick – roll up to our pedals, retreat, roll, retreat, while we crash with nubby tires down the thin spine of beach, the heaving water to the east a balm, a coolant, a passage, a lifter-up, a dragger-down, a dark and silent grave. … More Interstitial
On my way north, once again, Highway E curves into a 25 mph crawl past a post office and a closed taxidermy shop, toward the county building that was once my elementary school that now holds snowplows. A hawk flies low over the road toward the sun setting nearly in the south – so close … More Bliss
black heeled shoes sink in the spring-batter Earth that takes, that tallies, that deducts one more from the zero step; just step around the shallow warren, where five baby bunnies wriggle in the warm black dirt butts up, born and living and dying in this brief aside, this hyphen, inside the sanctuary my friend’s father … More St. Edward and Isadore Church; Exeunt, Pursued by a Bear
Her hands flit about in my mouth, landing tooth upon tooth, sharp beaky instruments scraping and picking tiny morsels – she chirps to me as she works – how her boys shot their BB guns at chickadees; “If you shoot it, you eat it,” she told them, which seems like as good a rule as … More Chickadee Song
Halfway North 