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
We got an hour back on Sunday, hundreds of years ago, when there was still some modicum of hope. And then the wind came through like a train on Tuesday, pulling all the leaves down with it and heaping it into wet greasy piles along the road while people lined up and marked their ballots. … More Lane Assist
If you can get past the pictures of men holding fish men in the bathroom mirror men shirtless in bed with their dogs men lifting weights in gyms men with guns men with cheap bottles of beer men with Maga Hats men in their cars men on motorcycles men on barstools men making kissy faces … More The Detritus of Hope and Unopened Scotch
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
I retrieve the already-read newspaper for my dad from my car while we wait for breakfast omelets in the late afternoon, his eyes patched from melanoma scrapes. He looks like he got in a fist-fight. “Thems that die are the lucky ones!” he had said, coming out of surgery, a pirate. “Arrr, arrr, arrr.” The … More Halloween at the Blackstone Diner
At 100 N. Jefferson St in Green Bay, City Hall: the ladies of democracy all have their backs turned when I walk in for early voting, attending to the copy machine, the phones, the trash, as though it’s an ordinary day with the office in order. Finally one of them, my age, with bangs, takes … More The Ladies of Democracy
In early October along the river’s edge, deer hooves have printed the mud with quotation marks, although they had nothing to report. They drank the cold water in silence and slipped back into the woods. It’s not yet five o’clock but the sun is already stumbling sideways and falling behind the Wisconsin treeline, rays flailing … More Undone
I have staked out a sliver of an acre in this king-sized country where I am held carefully in the dark like the opening quotes and the first few words of a song – through the open window I can hear the world as it grows lighter, I hear sandhill cranes trilling to each other … More Suspension
Fall comes on too strong/ Branches up in summer’s skirt/ Before she thinks no/
I stand a moment in the space you left, while summer air curls through the windows wide – I, reconciling, make the empty bed, the sun lies on the laundered sheets and sighs; Your desk, your chest, your closet – clean and spare, these books have all been read, the records played – the things … More Leaving for College in a Year Marked by Plague Calls for a Sonnet
Halfway North 