Excerpts
Swan’s Home
For my soul is full of troubles, and my life draweth nigh unto the grave. —Psalm 88 The call comes at high noon, with the sun bright on the rocks and sage, not in the dark midnight hours like Ferrell Swan always expected. On her cell from his old Ohio home, his ex-wife Rilla asks …
Blue Danube
You buy happiness with a steel wick crowbar it to an unyielding clothesline as if the curse of desolation means a loss of buffed shoes a hint of want that drives worm holes into the carefully etched wood. September comes with its thrifty tongue the fragile egg cup the fusion of school days, boxed lunches …
Knoxville, 1979
It is late spring, I am on my knees pulling peanuts out of the red dirt. I shake the thin fibrous stalks, like spider webs, and when I put them in my mouth they taste like metal. I like the scrape of them against my teeth. The hum of the lawn mower grows louder in …
Two Hauntings
It’s mostly slag, the geologist says. He squints at each chunk of my dead grandmother’s rock collection, then up at me to see if my feelings are hurt. Glass, leftover. He tries the amber lump with his pocketknife, to see it break, I guess. Some copper ore, too, and basalt. Could be from anywhere. Her …
Risk
After he steps from the ladder to the limbs of the tree, he has to stop and holler an explanation to his wife, who’s seen him from the house: A baby swallow, he yells. It fell from the nest, and he knows she knows, though she does not say so, the idiocy of what he’s …
Descending on Iowa
The Mondrian blocks and lines of late autumn fields, browns etched with black and gold and then the blue-gray leaking of rivers and streams, edges thick with oak and maple on fire in the sun, still, how many years later, the ground rising faster, the grain trucks yellow, the dust following, farm houses ghosting by, …
Interior Perfection of the Mohave
Once familiar voices sighing like company overheard the lunatic Joshua-trees and absolutes of sun and sand say with the night wind chatter where will you stay? lines in sand, no roads to answer to, washboard weave, waves of an old seabed over these bones once making claims—and California sliding into the sea again how will …
To a Limited Extent
it’s not about how far you fall but how: you could break a leg by missing what you’d barely call a height, like the bottom step, your mind on another planet, your body dully at home, moving laundry or a chair. The damage may be minor, but it quietly ruins your plans. Never again, you …
Evening
A driver holds open the limo door as a diplomat steps in. Closer to the center a man leans over the edge of an upper balcony and shakes out his pink duvet. What is he hoping will drift loose: a single lost eyelash, the memory of her body, or does he only wish to capture, …