Tag: sense-of-place
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
Two Poems in New Zine: bonefolder no. 1
Bonefolder is made by hand in Nova Scotia by Michael Goodfellow and Natalie Rice.
Excerpt from bonefolder no. 1
Essay in Southeast Review: Cumberland by Sail
“I am tiny on the scale of sand and sea—but whether or not I am here to see them, it’s reassuring to think that, at any given time, somewhere beneath the rippling surface among the beds of seagrass, manatees graze. I’d like to think that Cumberland is a lesson in tenacity, but barrier islands have always been shaped by the sea in response to the elements. Now, I wonder, will they last?”
Read the full essay in Southeast Review
or purchase the full print issue here!
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.”
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.
New Essay: The House in the Desert
I have a short triptych out today in Hobart.
This essay is no longer available on Hobart, but
you can read the reprint in Variant Lit!
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: 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