Replacement Parts
Replacement Parts recording Drake lived in our shed for a month during the summer. At least that’s what we called it. The shed, our shack, a hut held up by the air itself. Not that it...
View ArticleMeditation on “In Memoriam”
Not “is survived by,” that gravely passive voice to deactivate the dead, but “He leaves his wife of fifty years, Constance,” as if the journey were his to determine, and compared with this life the...
View ArticleThe End of Southern History
And I return to the bear, claw marks and scratches on the tree, was it oak or pine, where the tinker chained his pet while he went from house to house hawking knifes and patching pans. A story told to...
View ArticleStrangers at Twilight
Huddle – Strangers at Twilight The black mare with the white diamond lets me bump foreheads with her across the fence, Then we’re at a loss. I was lonely the whole afternoon. All day her girl didn’t...
View ArticleBear Goes Metaphysical
Huddle – Bear Goes Metaphysical If I’m not a bear, thought the bear– and wistfulness rose in him, maybe he was a falcon, a redwood, a slug, a raccoon–but then his bear brain made him look down at his...
View ArticleExcursions to the Town Dump: Poets and Their Notebooks
Late in Queen Victoria’s century, a young Jesuit seminarian set the following entry down in his notebook: “April 27, 1871….Mesmerized a duck with chalk lines drawn from her beak sometimes level...
View ArticleWings, 1989
That day in July my mom came out of the house, wiped her soapy hands on her thighs, and told me to get my lazy bum up off the grass and go weed the peas. She wore rolled-up blue jeans, a cotton blouse,...
View ArticleSoothsaying
Soothsaying Audio The clanking of the car’s engine ceases a few miles outside of town and Cliff and I settle into it, the wide quiet. We’re told that here, high up and in fall, aspens turn whole...
View ArticleBuying the Cross at Bible Camp
Buying the Cross at BibleCamp Audio I’m eating rice krispies when my mother asks me whether I’d like to go to church camp. She pours corn flakes for my little sister and douses them with...
View ArticleTranslator
In the ninth summer of the conflict, I was hired as a translator for a foreign officer. My wife was furious. For days, she refused to speak to me other than mumbling That man is the devil even though...
View ArticlePermian Flats
“Permian Flats” was runner-up in the 2nd annual Bevel Summers Prize for the Short Story. It had taken them three days to find the Spragg boy. A migrant worker heading to Permian Flats had...
View ArticleGoran Holds His Breath
Althouse: Goran Holds His Breath The birds on the water have not heard him yet. Once they do they will burst upwards in flight and he will press the trigger. A gaggle of nine geese, necks huddled,...
View ArticleThe Ice River History Museum, Formerly Saint Catherine’s Convent
Hollmeyer_IceRiverHistoryMuseum Dot hobbled along with her walker, making apologies for moving slow since her fall. The docent asked what happened, and she explained about the dark cat in the dark...
View ArticleOde to Girl with Hand on Barbed Wire
Somewhere between McCook and the grid of rural routes she had traveled to reach the farm, Letty had applied a coat of lipstick. She liked to drive with the window down, her hand pressed flat against...
View ArticleHer Last Boy
Let me tell you bout my boy, she says, the way they do, the gnarled walnut knuckles working like the gnarled walnut of their cheeks swollen with that pride that slows her speech from the gallop it also...
View ArticlePassage
John Casteen– Passage Bollard & bulkhead, cormorant & clew, spindrift, scene: the pitchkettle Tropic of Capricorn. The city. The sea in its unsurprising windrows; the glyph of the break-...
View ArticlePeregrine
Peregrine (audio introduction 2012) I saw Melvin Wood, The Tree Man, in Mall Mart while I was buying travel size toiletries for my upcoming Cruise to Nowhere. To keep him from seeing me, I turned to...
View ArticleFirst Lessons on a Whore’s Mouth Harp
The best still play all tongue, and most with old love letters and lungs. But sinners choose to kiss all tooth and grind that steel as pelvic bone, or bit, or even burden. Coo arrives less like a doe’s...
View ArticleMine
I am a woman; I am a mountain, I hover over you, a thumb laid hard across the thickest vein that pulses fuel down your neck. I’ve locked my knees beneath oceans, and for nine hours at a time, I’ve...
View ArticleFirst Person
One lies on one’s back in the woods, savoring the sun, and for some reason one has opted for what Fowler calls the “false first person pronoun”—one, that is, over the other. One brushes an ant from...
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