Author Archives
Bill Pearse publishes memoir, travel journals, poetry and prose, and lives in the Pacific Northwest.
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The intensely masculine act of grilling meat
I just felt detached from it all. A strange summertime with no parties, no hosting. Getting blasted in the backyard instead, staring at the sky, waiting for the first star.
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Who’d hex the moon?
I went outside with John Coltrane, my portable speaker and a beer. Most of that good Irish cheese had gotten moldy but I ate around the bad parts. Mom sent an email photo of a tissue she blew blood into… Read More ›
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Twilight gazing
At night the light through our bedroom window is a deep blue and the fan blows by the dog’s bed, and I think most times I don’t realize how good we’ve got it. There’s the skylight with the pole I… Read More ›
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Looking out a window that isn’t there
We watched the days combine down. Grew more irritable with each other and felt some new edges to the quarantine. In that clinical way the help turns tables at large events or restaurants so I did with my family: no… Read More ›
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Grace given over nostalgic fabrics
This shirt. This shirt I got at a second hand shop in Liverpool that’s rayon with blue flowers and rust-colored accents. Had it since ‘98. Like the beloved rayon shirt in college I buried my cat Sherman in, just because…. Read More ›
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Connected to the land like a severed hand
Summer ran down. The mosquitoes had no need for me, my blood was bad. They sat on me with their proboscises out but couldn’t get it in. But the flies! Flies all over me, mistaken me for dead, for excrement…. Read More ›
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That feel
I sat waiting for it with my eyes closed. I heard the music from upstairs mix with the sounds of my own music. I chewed the ends of my mustache and saw the pattern of grass and how it looked… Read More ›
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Postcards from a distance, “wish you weren’t here”
There is a pervasive sense of loss in all this, a strange peace that could be a kind of acceptance or another form of dismay. The frame of our worlds collapsing down, retracting.
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Terror twilight
The bobcat in our yard must have disrupted the balance because everyone was talking about it from the crows to the neighbor dogs to the lesser birds and bats. They were all peeping and cheeping and the crows, with that… Read More ›
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Face ID
The reflection throws back a version of myself that’s real but see-through The gray light of day. The pattern of squares across my window pane. The sound of a record from another time projecting me backwards and setting me down… Read More ›
Bill Pearse 