Trapped inside a black pyramid in Las Vegas for four days, moving through the underground tunnels like mice between hotels, casinos, the convention center. Returning to summertime rain in Seattle and falling asleep to it, the sound of static, of… Read More ›
writers block
Stopping to pay the toll on the road to self
At times there seemed to be so much beauty I couldn’t convey it, and at other times it evaded me for weeks or for months, for what seemed like forever. I sensed a link between my seeing the beauty and… Read More ›
Lisbeth Salander will have her reckoning
The upsetting quality of the music I play. The look of my hair after several days without shampoo. The sense I should be outside but don’t feel like it, the look of the snow after it finally seeps into our… Read More ›
“Believe”
I grind my teeth at night, I clench my jaws what’s troubling me, beneath the surface? big, prehistoric fish swimming low? my fears, my desires, combined to one? you clench your jaws for all you want to say but cannot,… Read More ›
4:59, Friday
In my time of darkness I go back to the old haunts, to Raymond Carver: I closed the book and he looked back, and in the morning spoke to me on the toilet, in my bathrobe with my phone: He… 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 ›
Blurred passage to poem
How the poem appeared an object in the mist I paddled toward and circled round And though it was odd and lustrous, with living things nesting and squirming inside, it was too tall and slick for me to climb. Better… Read More ›
The self-confining myth of inspiration by routine
Call it superstition, that ritual for good luck before you perform. I go to the same spot in our den, put on a record, light a stick of incense, hope that magic happens on the keyboard. After a time you… Read More ›
Discreet Music | “Brutal Ardour,” Jan. 22, 2018
So on a typical Monday here in the suburbs: Lily (12) starts seeing a therapist and texts me, “My therapist said I shouldn’t worry about finishing my homework tonight.” Charlotte (10) is caught moping over the kitchen island drawing another… Read More ›
Late morning early fall, the beginning of the end all over again
I go to nature to heal, I go every day. And though it always feels the same, it never is. I rummage through the past and present, I go looking for what others leave behind. I didn’t expect the moon… Read More ›