We watch them watch us, a family of four, a tribe “in the world” but not “of it.” Our clothes are shirts-tucked-in-to-the-real-waistline and modest-the-dress and the hat-cannot-be-backwards. We shuffle and do not know how to stand when our parents ask for the grocery manager. Can you turn off the music while we shop? At the checkout counter,…
Vivian is still alive when it happens, sitting alone in Chicago on a far northside park bench overlooking Lake Michigan, as the storage war hipsters start selling her photographs. I have not seen pictures of her sitting there, but imagine a faded blousy dress, the scratched bench, the spray of waves against the broken revetment…
Education got us into this. – Murray Sinclair I will go to the archives. What will I look for? Another place, simply, where the past speaks? I call Linda Johnson, former Territorial Archivist of Yukon. I tell her I am going to the archives. What should I do there? What should I look at; what should…
I find in this wilderness a being who only wears pants, has always only worn pants. Lucky Brand jeans for dates, Levi’s for swagger, Carhartts for work. A self who carries a pocket knife everywhere because I never know when it might be necessary to open the straight-edged locking blade sheathed in the polished, blond…
Autumn Blaze Maple October is warmer than usual. All weekend, social media friends post pictures of high school homecoming dances. Their daughters wear short tubes of colorful fabric held in place with hip bones and spaghetti straps. The homecomings I remember were chilly. The popular girls wore Irish knit sweaters that swung like thigh-length hoop…
An hour and a half north of Bishop, up a road with a view of Death Valley; that’s where to find the ancient bristlecone forest, and when I say ancient, first, there are trees in those woods who—who? That? Who—trees who are two to three thousand years old, who fully remember who they’ve always been. They…
When I was seven years old, my parents noticed I had perfect pitch and could play almost anything by ear, so they started me on piano lessons. But I had trouble with my fingers: they were somehow never independent and my struggles to keep from bending two at a time made my wrists tighten. I…
“Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation …” —Gravesite of President John F. Kennedy (1917–1963), Arlington National Cemetery (reinterment 1967), Quoting JFK’s Inaugural Address (1961) “The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou heareth the sound thereof,…
1. Lavabo y Espejo, by Antonio López García, is a painting of a bathroom sink and mirror. The sink, fused to the wall, floats. Its shadow grows west. The mirror above waits, empty, reflecting no person, only the square tiles of the opposite wall. On a transparent shelf between sink and mirror sit tools meant for…
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