At the end of a long day I cleaned myself in the back yard with Pablo Neruda, setting him down on my stomach, rubbing my eyes the way you would a catcher’s mitt, breaking it in. And I remembered a… Read More ›
prose
The Oxford comma
Dawn said there’s a cheaper treatment for lice, where you just put mayonnaise on your head and tie it off in a bag and then wait a couple hours, and they die from the oils. I learned about the Oxford… Read More ›
Lines (of longitude and latitude)
Though the tree is dead, it’s home to a lot of bugs, birds and bats, you can tell by the holes. It’s like the abandoned factory across the street from our apartment in Philadelphia that became home to the homeless,… Read More ›
Wilhelm’s mausoleom
I stopped by the dry cleaners, then the car wash — vacuumed out the pollen, the cottonwood, pine needles and dandruff, the nail clippings and dirt, then gathered wood to make a fire later, shook off the spiders from the… Read More ›
The god of only children
For some reason when I’m in Portland I feel like I can be more myself, maybe because no one knows me here. I wake and walk down César Chávez to the Starbucks in the cool, marine air. And remember the… Read More ›
Gray of lake combined to sky, the same
Through the narrow path in the nearby park, a semi-circle that crowns my walk, the trees are leaning in and damp with dew. It’s late spring now, past peak, broken petals brought down by an overnight rain. I come to… Read More ›
One Saturday in May, with ’77 million paintings’ playing
The cottonwood started falling and now it feels like we’re in a snow globe that won’t stop. Charlotte and I went to the aquarium and looked at the octopus, its sheep eyes, the valves where the cheeks would be, opening… Read More ›
No soft shoulders
On my walk to the lake it was definitely May, with a thin film of fog and many colors beneath. The pink cherry blossom blooms thrown down like confetti — the robins and rabbits, all the sights and sounds of… Read More ›
Walk on guilded splinters
Though it works hard it’s the slowest clock I’ve ever seen, falling behind by an hour or more every day. I finished my first two weeks in the new job, celebrated our wedding anniversary late, worked through some issues with… Read More ›
Arabesque No. 2 in G major
At last the rain stopped, and the fog set down on the tallest trees. Their shoulders were slung low from the weight of it all, and the morning street lamps were on their last shift. But the birds sang as… Read More ›
Bill Pearse 