Author Archives

Bill Pearse publishes memoir, travel journals, poetry and prose, and lives in the Pacific Northwest.

• Sisyphus in the underworld of our kitchen

  By Bill Pearse on June 11, 2021 • ( 18 )

  

  It’s true, the microwave is sticky. Sticky on the insides, sticky when the door opens. And there’s hair on the kitchen cupboards, hair adhered to grease. Animal hair, but it doesn’t belong there. And mold on the insides of the… Read More ›

• What it takes to look like a poet

  By Bill Pearse on June 10, 2021 • ( 3 )

  

  There is nothing ordinary or light about you. You don’t look into the camera, you look down or sideways. You do that because the weight is too much for anyone to bear, the weight of your gaze. You know that,… Read More ›

• Postcard from the Mediterranean

  By Bill Pearse on June 9, 2021 • ( 10 )

  

  I go back to the curves of that sea along the beach, shapely as a woman’s hips. To the dark, side street bars and waving aloe stalks, the persistence of salt in the maritime air.

• Song for Billy Collins

  By Bill Pearse on June 8, 2021 • ( 14 )

  

  All night while we sleep in the dark of the kitchen by the sink the coffee tumbler stands on its head upside down like a yoga pose in the drying rack beside the Belgian beer glass, the salad spinner, the… Read More ›

• Cloud Atlas for Dummies

  By Bill Pearse on June 7, 2021 • ( 31 )

  

  A dramatic spring sky where the clouds take on exotic shapes, this one taking me back to grade school when I first learned about plate tectonics, the idea our earth was once supercontinents that broke apart, that you could fit… Read More ›

• Off the coast of Connemara

  By Bill Pearse on June 6, 2021 • ( 14 )

  

  We did not know it then, we drove to the end of the world on a nameless peninsula, a spit off the edge of Ireland, some cheap car we rented in Dublin, a stick, we drove all day across that… Read More ›

• Song for reopening

  By Bill Pearse on June 5, 2021 • ( 18 )

  

  And after so long, a whole season of seasons spent indoors, it sounds like the whole world is reawakening.

• The new Walt Whitman smartphone

  By Bill Pearse on June 4, 2021 • ( 16 )

  

  It fits in your palm like a lotus blossom, like a butterfly.

• Not yet remembered

  By Bill Pearse on June 3, 2021 • ( 23 )

  

  Then let it be like that, reduced to this: in the dark corner of some forgotten jacket, crumpled like a dead spider with its legs willy-nilly I will pull it out and hardly recognize it for what it was or… Read More ›

• Testosterone in pink

  By Bill Pearse on June 2, 2021 • ( 20 )

  

  This shirt is salmon pink, a new, tight-fitting shirt for a man. A man bold enough for pink, for a stiff collar and a tight weave. Who conceals the limp from his plantar fasciitis on his way across the grocery… Read More ›