I think the magic of reading and writing is the startling places to which it whisks our brains and emotions, most notably the places inside ourselves that we’ve forgotten or didn’t know about in the first place.
***
I said that not long ago. I got to be part of the June 3 “Local Writers Read,” sponsored by SHARK REEF and Lopez Bookshop, and when I was asked to give a little bio and a few quotations to be used in my introduction, that’s what I said.
***
I was wrong.
Continue reading...I wake up every morning, and think that I am strong enough not to have coffee. But the truth is, I have coffee anyway. This is how it unfolds. I lie in bed thinking, I feel pretty good. The rash isn’t too bad at the moment. I should probably start a detox diet today. I’ll just wake up, have a little decaffeinated green tea, then something like fruit and
Continue reading...For me: a train forever west, fragrance of old steel, engine smoke.
By day, the view car: wraparound glass and free chardonnay,
always west through fields of new corn,
muscled mountains, whitewater river,
occasional deer, cinnamon feathered ducklings.
If you wrote love letters to Mickey and Roger and Yogi,
If you waited all day for the call, just
to see if you made the team;
If your dad went to meetings about diamonds
Continue reading...The learned professor who doesn’t have a cat says to young writers: All you have to write about is your life. Rubbish!
Continue reading...I learned to listen for the low squeak
of cheese curds between my teeth,
that noise matching the satisfaction
of new flavor and even newer family,
and you and I sat somewhere inside
Continue reading...I lie awake in the darkness and laugh out loud. The sound wakens Stewart from a shallow sleep.
“What’s funny?”
“I’m happy,” I say and he murmurs something and sleeps again.
I don’t tell him I am laughing with delight because he’s here, in my bed,
Continue reading...A place is cleared for the barber, moving aside boxes of donated diapers, baby food, bibs, tampons. The tarp he stretches over the well-stomped dirt is the green color of a bountiful spring, in direct contrast to the cold rain pouring beyond the awning.
Continue reading...Viewed from a great height, the Eureka Creek watershed looks like a human ear. You can see the ear from a jet plane, or in a satellite photograph, or on a topographical map. You can’t see the ear when you are in it. In fact, in the North Cascades, you can seldom see the true and complete shape of a watershed while you are in it—especially if you are below
Continue reading...I relax as my car slides under the edge of the large truck. Huge double tires rush toward my windshield. Screech. The car swerves in a circle. Bang. The air bag slams into my chest. A giant hand seems to push me violently back in the seat. Immediately the bag deflates, and I slump forward. The car bangs into the median and stops with a lurch. Something
Continue reading...Jade’s clearest memory is of the night her mother tried to drown her. She recalls loud, hysterical laughter as Jade told knock-knock joke after knock-knock joke. Tank who? Boo who? Olive who? Her mother laughed so hard she cried, and then the walls of the small bathroom were closing in on the two of them.
Continue reading...How she hated thunder. How she sat so still and quiet when the tornado came and then hated the thunder even more, and the hard rain, and even a winter wind. And how she walked in the mist and drank wild water from the gutter, refusing the silver water bowl, wanting to drink the sky.
Continue reading...We are en route to Denver, Colorado. The sun is setting over the desolate Nevada mountains. Simple red dirt and sage brush. The landscape is wiry, stark. The peaks are far away. I want to run to them.
The sky is huge. Casinos and motels and RV camp sites appear as soon as you leave the High Sierras of California. We descend.
Continue reading...I first met the Pacific Ocean at Cannon Beach when I was a kid. Tourists hadn’t taken over the town yet and it felt like we had the beach to ourselves. The vastness, and how puny I felt at the edge of the ocean was like looking into space at the moon and stars. The sense of amazement, the size and power of all that water, the sound of it breaking on the
Continue reading...Sunny California began her career in director Pierre Woodman’s film, “The Good, the Bad, and the Naughty,” a wild-west themed hardcore film featuring—among others—stars Eva Angelina and Tori Black (just prior to her retirement from the industry). Sunny appeared in a segment with another rising starlet, Scarlett Gray, in a lesbian love scene.
Continue reading...My husband is dead; I can finally tell the truth.
Endings have always been hard for me. The end of this story, my telling of what happened, how it unfolded like the wings of an origami crane and then kept unfolding until it was nothing more than blank paper too wrinkled for use, will probably go awry. I’ll be compelled to tidy up,
Continue reading...It’s in Chicago’s Shedd aquarium of all places.
I’m there on a rainy weekday, one of those rare times when the great marble-columned front hall isn’t rebounding with children’s voices. Only the unemployed would be there at such a time, poking around the water snake tanks in the dark corners of the jungle habitat. Only the people
Continue reading...Against the dirty clouds he’s no bigger than a word
and the waves of his tinny chirp drift
across the yard before falling noiselessly,
dusting the bare lilac tree without waking it.
He does not know, of course, he can drop dead
The oribatid soil mite is a one-man band,
A Rube Goldberg concoction.
Green, orange, purple, pink,
Grotesque with a bluster of tendrils. Devilishly
Clever as the curse or blessing
I ride the Buenos Aires colectivo,
behind a man my age, his brown
pants not quite a match for the coat,
a meticulous dark Windsor knot
slipped through a turned white collar,
R was born a clock. In the beginning his parents had to wind him every two hours. Nobody slept. Then the treatments started to work. Within a month he was a calendar.
Continue reading...
