There was the outfit I’d worn the day before and probably the day before that, in a pile on the floor by the bed. I sat up and got into it like I was going in reverse, stood up, slapped… Read More ›
existentialism
‘Reentry Burns,’ coming back to America
When I got back from Germany Dawn met me at the airport and we went for lunch at the brewhouse. The bathroom smelled the same as it always did and I think the bartender recognized me, even though we’d been… Read More ›
Corpse pose, prose
When we came back from Germany last year I had May, June, July, August, and September off before I went back to work. And before that I had a year not working, starting just before Christmas. How fast the clouds… Read More ›
‘Where the shadows run from themselves’
I got back in the slot, the cafeteria salad bar at work, tonged some shredded carrots, spinach, diced beets…made a modest bird’s nest out of it, weighed it, scanned my card, picked a two-top by the windows and started in…. Read More ›
Factotum (for Peel)
After college I moved to the beach and got a job delivering pizzas; my friend Peel moved to New York and dabbled in homelessness and then on to Portland, where he fell in with a group of shoplifters who returned… Read More ›
‘Where he’d really be’ (for Alfred Lambert)
There’d been some sun for a few minutes in the morning but then it went back to gray and acted like it would storm. The days fanned out like messily cracked eggs fumbling for the edges of the pan, legless… Read More ›
The sweet smell of woodsmoke mixed with ocean spray
I pulled into Portland around sunset, crossed the grated bridge through the city limits, two fingers of light left on the horizon. Hard to keep my eyes on the road with the snow-covered volcanoes on my left, the sky turning… Read More ›
A matter of degrees
Lily’s crying upstairs now but it’s not the cries of a child, it’s the depths of horror, of hormones. She doesn’t seem interested (in an emotional way) in the bedtime ritual, it’s more transactional now—like anything, it doesn’t happen overnight,… Read More ›
Life lessons from dreaming dogs
The dog in her sleep quivered, you would have thought she was dead she looked so still – some replayed scene imagined to make her believe she was somewhere else, living.
Early autumn mixer
In the morning the moon was a hook and we sat under it going down. Lily and I went birthday shopping for Charlotte intent on a guitar and a bake set but came out with a $120 giraffe. No one… Read More ›
Bill Pearse 