Tag: maine
New Essay in Electric Literature
“Making a narrative out of a life requires a lot of distilling. You gather as much flotsam from the past as you can and try to piece it all together just the way you remember it, only now, all your memories are liquid and volatile and won’t form a complete picture anymore. Eventually, you leave out the parts that you can’t make fit or the ones you don’t like thinking about. With time, these pieces fade until you can’t even remember what you left out anymore and the narrative becomes the memory.”
New Publication: This Ground
Up now in the newest issue of Vagabond City:
THIS GROUND
…From the ground of this Arizonan desert branches rise as the roots of the sky, and I wonder now, what is the difference between a hundred places and no place?…
New Publication: Tidal Desert
Published this week in the lovely Winter issue of Hawk & Whippoorwill
TIDAL DESERT
…Because I could descend in the chasm of dissolution between the layers of sandstone to where life is pressed like petals,
I began to sense the land’ s lungs beneath the soil, see the hardness of the desert and understand that here, life is not to be presumed…
New Publication: Mudsoft, Hardtack
Published today in Issue 6 of Sky Island Journal
MUDSOFT, HARDTACK
My first gasp was over the wide Sheepscot River,
mama panting in the speeding car,
holding me in…
New Publication: Grafting
Published in the Spring/Summer issue of the Aurorean
GRAFTING
Among high ponderosas in Arizona,
I remember Maine’s white pines—
how after climbing them,
their clear sap drew pieces of that homeland
straight into my hands.
I have been grafted here and there,
with the seasons, out of season,
I have loved light rising like heat
across highways dredged through the land,
woken to a broken shard of sunrise
reaching through a canyon.
I am fastened in transient topography
by the movement of stars,
the constancy of things I cannot hold.
The sun seeps up through the Atlantic.
Maine shifts into the idea of belonging,
in longing, as if it no longer exists.
It is like the memory of a scent.
Download a pdf of the original poem here