Author: Editor

“You’d better not write a poem about this,” my daughter warns, only half-joking.  She’s just visited her cousin in prison, a young man she’s never been really close to but whom she’s known all his life. “Where’s my pen?” I joke back, but I wonder what she must think of me, a guy who exploits… Continue reading Keeping Confidences

Interstate traffic veers smoothly right as some State road remnant, a pale-laned highway swatch, trails left through median weeds competing with cracked asphalt, pebbles, and ragged  pea-gravel, fades to little but sparse struggling chicory and a vague dry & pale spiked green horizon, populated by Monarchs and locusts flitting aimlessly toward oncoming diesel grilles, or,… Continue reading Ghost Road

Here, the triangular couplings of the cars twist, veer off inclines into levees, freight-doors open, chickens half- fluttering, feathers settling the dust: the caboose man running, jumping the debris, rubbing his on red eyes.

used to follow me when I went to physical therapy running housewife errands and in Montana a highway patrol car trailed us when we drove back to Spokane when my husband and I returned from a family visit to his stepmother’s house in Wyoming before she had her accident and passed on just like the… Continue reading Island Police

I waited until the gage was under a quarter tank before I stopped to fill up – dust partially covering the “E” – and I watched the numbers rise until full. Stale coffee and past- sale date cookies are my companions on these back roads With the windows down; cloudy gravel in my rear-view. Nick… Continue reading Under A Quarter

The familiar green bus hissed and puffed its way over to the stop where I had been waiting for the last half hour in the warm morning rain. My clothes, conform to my body’s thirty-something-form, hid nothing from the driver, as I flashed my bus pass, nonchalantly, then took a dry seat near the back… Continue reading The Green Bus

Combines and tractors kick up chaff, dust, headlights ragged streaks across half shorn fields. The twilight smells of sweet grain, dry air. A two lane highway curves through small farm towns full of church steeples, neon bar signs. She can’t imagine going back to any place like her hometown even as the shapes of houses… Continue reading The Apprentice Photographer Recounts This Story

Under the vast oak she croons to three other crones clustered in shade whose edge creeps close each time they settle in their lawn chairs. From this chosen remove they treasure end-of-summer sun. Through wrinkled skin they absorb Karen’s song, a bluesy piece that floats sadly on and on      till it becomes a… Continue reading Karen’s Song