Tag: birds
Essay in Southern Humanities Review: Fragments of Bone, Fragments of Light
The world I had imagined as inanimate was coming into animation—rock and plant in constant motion, each species of animal living along its own vivid timescale. And while I had always struggled with the idea of death, I now found myself wondering why I had only been troubled by this future I would not witness—and not everything in the past that I had already missed.
Read excerpt and purchase the full print issue at Southern Humanities Review
Poem in Flyway
Excerpt from my prose poem in Flyway’s Winter 22-23 Outside Issue:
It’s easy now to forget about summer bearing down, the stories about fried eggs on the sidewalk. These are days I can believe each grey branch of the mesquite tree might be resurrected with spring leaves. And sometimes I think I don’t ask for so much—a lover who makes me feel wanted, creatures going about their own business, the potential for regeneration—and sometimes I think this is so much to ask for.
Read the full poem and check out the entire issue by clicking here.
Essay in EcoTheo Review
A short excerpt from my essay “Convergence” from the Summer 2022 issue of EcoTheo Review:
“The Gila River—opaque as butterscotch and laced with agricultural runoff—is ornamented with styrofoam cups, discarded truck tires and diapers engorged with river water. The vegetation is thick so it’s easiest to move in the river. I slide down the slick bank past the prints of a black bear whose movements I echo.
The calf-deep water is cool and ripples shimmy away from my footsteps like the fish that curl into eddies as I walk downstream. The Gila is one of the longest western rivers. Not so long ago, I could have floated from the headwaters in New Mexico through to the Gulf of California in a kayak or raft. Now, water is siphoned off into agriculture fields, reservoirs and canals that turn the Gila into a trickle halfway through its 500-mile journey towards the Colorado River. By the time it reaches this valley southeast of Phoenix, the Gila, whose headwaters are often called the birthplace of wilderness, is no more than an intermittent stream. My hiking boots saturate and sand fills their mesh as I wade, listening to the slur of my steps mix with the ensemble of birds calling along the river’s corridor. Under the shaded arbor of tamarisk, I pause. I am quiet. Sometimes you can only find a thing by being still.”
To read the full essay, purchase the issue (or subscribe!) by clicking here.
Two Summer Publications: Camas & Pidgeonholes
POINT COUNTS AND SHIFTING BASELINES in Camas Magazine
“Can we celebrate the wild just beyond the doorstep without conflating it with the wildness of places far from any doors? If we expect the wild to adapt to our cities and our lifestyles, where do we adapt to theirs. We must leave space and silence and open places for them to build their own nests, make their own paths through the desert, and communicate with each other in whisper songs.”
Purchase the issue to read in full
THE FIRST TIME in Pidgeonholes
“He sounds like one of the mice that live in the house I will move to the first time I try to leave him, the ones I will set hard metal traps for in the kitchen. I will hear the bitter snap and squeak of them at night when I try to fall asleep but instead replay a recent conversation in which he tells me I am easy to love.”
New Publication: What Happened on December 21st, 2019: A Retrospective
New words up today on Essay Daily!
…I had been working on an essay about fragments: fragments of bone, fragments of light, and what the space between these fragments can embody. I’m learning to pay attention to these spaces. A lot can happen in the subtext, in the distance between things, in the space of what is left out, in the time between December 21st and March 16th…
New Publications: Lunar Eclipse off Exit 88 & What Gould's Magpie Has Stolen
Two poems up now in the latest issue of Minding Nature, a publication from the Center for Humans & Nature.
Cover Art by Courtney Mattison
LUNAR ECLIPSE OFF EXIT 88
Somewhere in Oklahoma, speeding through scrubby darkness, we pulled off the highway on Exit 88…
WHAT GOULD’S MAGPIE HAS STOLEN
For its feathers, the prism of light that broke its blacks into iridescence…
New Publication: Ode to a Rock Dove
Published this month in Entropy’s “The Birds” series
ODE TO A ROCK DOVE
—For JPD
You’re right.
A blackbird taken apart
by a raptor is not the same
as the nestling pigeon,
wet from rain,
run into the
clogged freeway
by slavish,
hulking cars.
And of course it was a pigeon—
rat-of-the-sky,
pest,
dirty dirty bird—
call it
what they will,
you wish the authorities
would restore its name to dove,
dove, with all the potential
of cliches.
For isn’t that part of it?
We are a nation
in love with the idea
of pulling oneself up
by the bootstraps,
even as we call them pigeons,
even as we crush their bodies
as we inch forward dumbly
in our commute of tedium.
This ode is to the bird
that hadn’t yet grown feathers
with which to rescue itself
(and was given
no second chances)
so join me, reader,
with the same empathy
extended to the underdog,
and imagine its life if lived:
Imagine the search
for cold fries under a table
in pursuit of sustenance and survival
Imagine the spin and flash
of emerald and royal purple
in the drive to mate and remake
Imagine the power
of full-fledged wings
in the rush of rising up
up above traffic
up above streets
up above city
to look down on all of us.