The other day I heard somebody use the phrase, “the dead of winter,” and I thought, wow, it surely is. Punxsutawney Phil to the contrary—nor yet the strangely benign weather we’ve been having here in central […]



Podcast: A story about a change in roles.

A fictional story performed by Joe Guay.

Read the story online: Come and Get My Gun

It’s insane to try to sort days out of days. Some days you have it and some you don’t, but the thing you have or not is never just one thing: it is a stockpile, an accumulation, a buildup, a collection, a poo […]

The Pines

Behind Snow Drive,
rusty needles led to a pine grove,
where we made little circles
with dirty rocks
and lit little fires
with matches lifted
from the corner store.
These days the pines
that […]

Not until age seventy did I recall a place I’d never been—the Teenage Fair. Launched in 1961, it became a so-called “mini world’s fair for teenagers” which featured, according to one of its newspaper ads, a “b […]

“I change, but cannot die.” Shelly “The Cloud”

As my wife and I are on our morning walk, I often comment on the clouds above: the constant change they float themselves through, the subtlety of hues they dr […]

While I waited there
in the terminal at Newark,
I spotted something
out of the corner of my eye.
It was a bird flying back
and forth along the ceiling,
and because I was
in an airline […]

Once I spent an afternoon at Appomattox walking the Via Dolorosa of the Confederacy. The Richmond-Lynchburg Stage Road is mostly just a trace now but this is the scene of the last march. Here’s where Bobby Lee r […]

Peace Offering
I still don’t know what to do
with the jacket hanging in my
closet. It’s not that old but like
a Brautigan novel is out of fashion.
Maybe it all comes down to math
and how for the first tim […]

I remember the exact moment when I decided to become a writer. It was the winter of 1987. I was in sixth-period study hall, gripping Stephen King’s Pet Sematary. The book catapulted me into the world of Louis C […]

The plant in the corner needs to be watered. It’s staring at Anita again. A cold deadpan interspersed with the occasional slow blink. The plant doesn’t have a mouth but if it did she imagines that it would yel […]

The city of my birth, as seen from above, is a ragged landscape of canyons. Highrises, lowrises, the steeple of an old brick church. Streams of yellow taxicabs where forests of hickory and chestnut once grew. To […]

—for Nicole Marie

She asked me to stand by her side,
But I wanted to see it all
Because I knew that I’d forget—
Even as hard as I’d want to remember—
The brunt and the bitter
Forcing my son in […]

I love mornings.

For me, this time is full of promise and magic and possibility. Anything could happen today. Nothing negative has marred the perfection of the peace and quiet. No one has made any demands. The […]

Once the Thunder Stops

and it’s safe to venture out, we walk
to the end of the drive, out to the road,
through the mire & torn branches.
The smell of our wood fire mingles

with eucalyptus. We have only t […]

Mountain spruce
on upward slopes:
their pale under-blue
unwraps the clouds
in their slow round
of visiting.
We taste tracery
of strange soaps
on our skins. You
turn towards me,
awake […]

Like most people, I have done things that I wish I had not done, but it seems rare that something I am sorry I did is linked inextricably to something else I am glad to have done.

Growing up in a middle-class […]

I’m dreaming. I am in my old life, the life that no longer exists. I am married and I have a daughter, although in the dream she is young and not an adult. And things are going wrong. We are in the midst of a l […]

Many of my art works are rooted in science with an affinity for outer space. In June 1969, as America fulfilled J. F. Kennedy’s dream to put the American Stars and Stripes into the dusty surface of the […]

Twin sisters Fuchsia & Diamond,
twins in the sense they matured
in the same kiln, not expelled
from one womb, dance to punk
band A Testament Of Youth,
Tuesday night, Dugan’s Deli,
Iowa State U […]