My mother gave me her old Nikkormat camera when I was 13 years old. She’d spotted my interest in books of photographs by Ansel Adams and Edward Weston and set me on an evolving path.

I used the […]

Machinery and tools—their design, operation and production—were early interests that would shape Blake Hurt’s professional and creative life. “I picked a field of engineering that would be relative […]

Memphis, on the brink of World War II, a crowded city, my family squeezed in a small duplex. Mother and Father work in weapons factories. We’re gathered around the radio in our tiny living room.

Suddenly a s […]

It was midnight of our last night in the cannery, and all twelve of us who had been assigned the fish house had been working since seven that morning. All day and into the light-filled night, we had been cleaning […]

Stevie Nicks
 
Under the strobes
guitar hands, neon blonde.

She sings like a forty-year-old child,
wears a witch’s cape.

Tosses back her jukebox tenor
to the audience.

We stone up,
all the freaks in […]

Conveyance
 
Between the bones of the plat
and the sale of our land, so much needs

to be done to make the title clean.
The deed marked what everyone knew

then—the creek to the quarters
to the gr […]

Then I Returned to the House of the Slow Letting Go
 
I went out into the evening,
walked alone with my clippers
to dead-head the marigolds
the peonies, no longer spinning planets,
and the now brown-leafed […]

The view from the bus station was disappointing. All I could see was the traffic on Calliope. That, and the bottom of the Causeway, all concrete and metal, darkened by decades of weather and exhaust. The fall air […]

I haven’t seen Dave this excited in months, since before our son left for college.

“We’ll see a compressed version of Arnold’s life,” he says, sprinkling his fingers like falling fireworks. “Can you imagine? Yo […]

Sometimes he dipped his popcorn into his coffee. He only did that when the popcorn was burnt. Today, it was the coffee that was burnt. The popcorn was soggy. But it was breakfast. The same breakfast he had eaten […]

Links of Ladder
 
Higher than a hired man’s head,
a chain bubbles from the tree’s heart
and falling thirteen links, dares
a boy’s reaching, his pretending—
its original purpose unknown.
It is not a hanging […]