This multiple-part series is from a longer work-in-progress I’ve begun that recounts my experiences in Recapture Canyon in southeast Utah. Woven throughout the longer narrative are my ideas about language’s part in evolution, culture, and relationship–including what language reveals about and how it affects the ways we treat with people who live with what I [...]
We’ll breakfast at Las Brisas when we’re gray,
Discussing all our commonalities
And differences, admiring the breeze.
We’ll chatter and remark about the way
The rocking eucalyptus branches seem
To hammock threads of morning sun along
The coast. Pale clouds will sift to butter-cream
And melon, swimming through a blue sarong
Of tinctured sky. I’ll scan the beach and sea
Where I once played [...]
Today I read your verses, and I wept.
Your loss, transcending centuries, has torched
a hole in my self-pity, scattered ash
across four hundred years, and scorched
my martyrdom into the oak-slat floor.
The sad account of how your house burned down,
your passing of the ruins every day.
Each broken brick of future, smudged and brown.
And now I know the leaving [...]
I walk barefoot through the grassy
knoll,
your heaven – remembering your
green thumb and long sought after
gardens
lost to daydreams or disease.
The flowers you planted I never
learned
the names of, something exotic,
I was never good in Latin. These
you spent
the most time with, watering them
like children. I think they listened to
you more.
Your sister says I have no business
gardening – I [...]
I keep the totem in my pocket
as a harp song sung with a
steady bear paw, wedged
between your photograph
and an eagle feather. Before
we parted, you whispered it
would serve me well on rainy
days when my road was too
much to stand on. This morning
I pulled the car to the shoulder
to watch an osprey hover with
a cold sun. I [...]
Part One here.
Lala sat down on the curb and motioned for Davey to sit next to her. As he slowly sat down and settled his feet into the orange leaves filling the gutter, Lala was opening up her laptop and getting it ready for a little presentation.
“All right, now first of all, look at this [...]
Davey Dow was walking down the street a bit earlier and a bit happier than was usual for a Friday afternoon (Friday, usually, being the least halcyon of his days), and anyone on the street who may have known him would have swiftly gotten out of his way with that long and peculiar sidelong glance [...]
WIZ readers and writers: Remember that the deadline for Torrey House Press’s Creative Literary Nonfiction Contest (2,000-10,000 words) is midnight, September 30th. First Prize: $1000. Second Prize: $250. Third Prize: $100. There’s a $25 entry fee.
Torrey House is offering a special arrangement for entrants who can present “reasonable evidence” that they’ve bought Torrey House’s first [...]
Strange vibrations, east of coal country.
Black sky, dusted by filmy cirro-nebula.
Rumbling on a trestle, high above the Green,
train whistles legend’s high, lonesome sound.
Highest water in a decade, but river’s
calmed tonight, lapping in a little cove.
Noses streaked with sunblock, bodies
with Skin-so-Soft, hair silted with residue
of a day on the water, we’re children
on the verge of adolescence, [...]
On her closet floor, what
looks like a dried flower—
arrayed in a display of faded
glory (tendrils splayed
to welcome her)—plays
tricks on the eye. Can’t
say what stops her
from picking it up. But
living alone in the desert,
under an endless sky,
gives even a dead tarantula
a florid allure. And out
the back door of her Virgin
hideaway, the iris
(orange, green and brown
growths)—lovely or [...]