In 1982, I went to work with my friend Dave hauling trash, using a 1950s International truck, a classic old 1-ton, open-bed pickup. Somehow Dave became our estimator, despite being A. legally blind and B. pathologically reluctant to wear his glasses. This made for some interesting if unremunerative estimates, and we often wound up working […]
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Should Hope kiss a toad is continuously a puzzle, as pop eyes abound and sewn gapes of muzzle. Scrawny limbs may grow lithe or may remain scrawny. Distended pots may never tighten smooth and bonny. Hope scratches her various tight curls and looks serious. What if no dance emerges from these throttled leaps? What if
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Dorsey Templeton was a math teacher at my community college. He’d served in the 101st Airborne during the Korean War, gone to college under the GI Bill, and was an All State football player, on both sides of the ball. His heritage was Osage and Cherokee, and he never stopped teaching wherever he could about
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When all the starlings, robins, jays Have given up and gone to nest, The crows refuse the calling night, Defer the final rest. Over the waiting conifers They improvise an arabesque, A final celebration to The dying fire in the West. Like fighter pilots when flight was new, Over the field they chase and dive,
The firestorm that swept a swath of Mount St. Helens clean left nothing alive. Nothing. Nothing but a pumice field, lifeless and dry as old bones, devoid of any sustenance. Within a year, though, within a year, life had begun again, insects blew in on the wind and died and left phosphorus enough for a
Fat Man’s replica, the big death’s first egg, is polished and buffed like a Jemez pot, and white. Ceiling white, though, not the white of a Jemez pot, not the white made from a special place in the surrounding earth. Little Boy is well named, inflated younger brother, olive as only the Army could interpret