Nervous, the dog follows me up the hill looking for the moon. Last day of July. It wasn’t long after I tied up all the daisies they died. Because it couldn’t give me everything I wanted, I kept going back… Read More ›
prose
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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.
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 ›
The meaning of existence can’t be supplied by religion or ideology
Last night’s wood fire still broods, it hangs in the air. I am made older by it, my inability to relate. And the desire to retreat inwards, down a path with no exit and no room to turn around.
Song for the downward slant
The moon plumps up, bugs thicken. We watch the swallows by the lake flitter like bats in the morning. How blue the sky, clouds provide texture. You can look up there and pretend it’s a moving picture or maybe the… Read More ›
Shadow plots
I rubbed the heels of my hands in my eyes and tilted my head back. Out here it is just the sound of birds, the neighbors never really out. The sound of a slow-moving jet, a passing car rippling out…. Read More ›
Bill Pearse 