Sundays my sister Mary and I’d split bags of penny candy in the junkyard after raiding each room of our trailer for loose change and Pepsi cans. Climbing through the interiors of gutted clunkers, we declared truces that wouldn’t last the day. Our lips puckered from flavors— sour patch, lemonhead, warhead, airhead, sour belt, jawbreaker—…
First the good news: In spite of every dour pronouncement I’ve heard over the four decades I’ve called myself a writer, and probably going even farther back, literature as we know it is not in crisis. Reading is not obsolete. Books are not doomed. Print is not archaic, nor is it likely to become so….
Let the light be yellow but not candle-lit, quiet, incandescent, not cold yet not bright yet enough to sting the eye, close enough to see beside, clear enough to read …
…even if all the animals are oracles, I don’t want to have a bee under my pillow, even if it’s just a sign of the druidic image of community, even if it signifies the solar dance of the bee replicating the hive of the many in the streets or the village, signified clairvoyants of ultraviolet…
Her family moved to town from Omaha on Christmas Eve. Her father and mother are the new managers of the Sherman Ice Arena, which, thanks to the coal-baron millionaire who owns it, is open all year. It is mid-January now, skating season. Half the town goes to the public skate on Saturday afternoon, the experience…
Greet the walker, walking in with the shadow of the hood shooing away the emphatic light. First cold night the blinds flicker down, each vinyl strip a white notion near as wide. August, gone, feels gone. The woman in another room, ever without honeymoon, hits snooze and spreads her hair behind her like the patch…
and I keep in touch with you’re pissing me off you’re pushing my buttons I’m not interested in rescheduling Listen! Do you hear that? That’s my tongue licking a laceration, a bloody metacarpal, a fracture; that’s my nasal baritone, my UUUUUU unfurling your foothold. Wolves keep in touch, and I with my keen sense sense…
Rusty Bickers went walking through the fields at dusk, Rusty Bickers with a sadness and nobility that only Joseph could see. Joseph dreamed of Rusty Bickers at the kitchen table, eating Captain Crunch cereal before bedtime, his head low, lost in thought; Rusty Bickers, silent but awake beneath the blankets on his cot, his hands…
A blackish hue clustered at our heels. You were in the mixed woods which meant I was in the same mixed woods. I kicked up the floor. Needles littered the lower air in standing dust, our shadows dotting the dirt mound sloped unnecessarily away. I peeled back in drying nut husks, upturned trunks of living…
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