The drive to the coast takes five hours from Seattle with three cities in between: Tacoma, Olympia, and Aberdeen. From Aberdeen it’s another two hours to the ocean, featureless and hard to keep awake. I’ve gotten better about what music… Read More ›
Memoir
Small towns, long looks, late summer one Saturday
When a car comes down the road we all look up. It’s like the looks we used to get from the locals pulling into that small French town. Morning clouds, afternoon sun. Saturdays sleeping in. Just the sound of the… Read More ›
Claws on stone
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 ›
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.
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.
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.
Bill Pearse 