In the mornings it’s so dark I just lay in the den watching constellations and listening to the clocks tick, thinking any day now I’ll start work. I read about portmanteau words like brunch, Brexit, and Microsoft. The word psionics,… Read More ›
death
Your Mom’s Ashes
Lily and her friends have formed a band called Your Mom’s Ashes, but spell it in a way that bastardizes the your and ignores the possessive for the mom’s. The four of them circle our property looking creatively blocked, needing… Read More ›
Kaleidoscope of life and death on the PCT
On the fourth day we rested only a couple hours from the last camp, still in the burn area. It was already getting hot by mid morning and I got there before Brad, eager to secure a camp. There was… Read More ›
Letters and passageways (5): trial runs
This is a series of rewritten journal entries from the summer I spent in the south of France, the first entry here. You wear it on your body, and you don’t even know what it means? Allanah grated potatoes onto… Read More ›
Song for late summer
The kids take pictures of me napping at unflattering angles. The first colors of fall start along the highway: the pink-purple fireweed against the green, the coming yellows and browns. Those black spruces leaning in the muskeg, long patches of… Read More ›
The first death
The dog’s warm tongue on my cheek, the den by the window where the sun comes in to expose the hair on my carpet, the dust on the lamps, the dirt on my legs from the morning’s hike. Going up… Read More ›
The sandtrap
There was not much new to the new year now, it seemed. Driving across the state, I ate a bag of wasabi-flavored smoked almonds in about 30 minutes, taking it by the handful, popping them one by one, wiping the… Read More ›
Ham on rye
In the lobby at the recreational cannabis dispensary they were putting up a Christmas tree, and in the shop where a sign says Enter Here and Pay Here everyone looked confused, and I asked about the CBD vs. THC combination,… Read More ›
‘Wax and wane’
By the time we got to the end of October I was done with it. The Halloween decals on the windows, the witches and skulls…it seemed to go on forever, like it should have been over by now. The skeleton… Read More ›
The soul dies first
At the end of it, the wick is either cut too short or it’s so long, it falls on its side and can’t stand up, won’t light. And so much wax left, in the shape of what remains. This body… Read More ›
