This book shelf is a crazy mix of random paperback novels and obscure hardcover biographies from the 60’s. No matter how many times I stare at this shelf, I always seem to find a selection I hadn’t seen before, and so I pull it odown and thumb through its crumbly pages. Then little bugs skitter across the letters and I sort of freak out, and that’s the end of that....

Lord do I miss these spots. La Colombe Rittenhouse Dilworth Park The Continental Midtown Graffiti Bar Bud & Marilyn’s Mission Taqueria

On the second to last day of this year, I stand at the clothesline and pin damp sheets and pillowcases still smelling of lavender. They snap and twist in the cold wind. I’m surrounded by all the dried and dead of the garden. Inside, I watch the bone broth simmer through the glass lid. The bubbles wiggle the chicken feet floating on the surface of the golden liquid. And I’m...

While the preacher spoke of a world beyond the veil, one half of a mated pair caught his neck in a loop of nylon cord that he or his mate had worked into their nest. He parted the louvers covering the exhaust vent and launched himself through to the outside. I closed the car door, then stood on the sidewalk, staring up at the side of the house. His bloodied...

Clusters of red and white brittlegills dotted the path through the back woods. Can’t know for sure which species, there are over 750 in the genus. But if there is any poetry in happenstance, then surely my path was strewn with Russula sanguinaria, bloody brittlegill, the deep, rich red of a life poured out at your feet.

We were alone for the afternoon, and so we walked around the lake, slowly, savoring the warmth of that Indian summer day. She patiently waited for me each time I stopped to take another, and another, and another. We watched flying creatures of all kinds enjoy a large patch of asters (I’d never before seen a Buckeye butterfly). Just as I was zooming in on the center of her web,...

At work or church I would say that the view was breathtaking, that the climb was invigorating, that watching the sun rise over blue mountains was moving, and I would mean every word. But what I would whisper to you in the quiet is this: …she reclined like a queen on a cushion of stone and watched birds of prey circling beneath her… …he grappled with fear and emerged a...

I saw your ghost standing at the top of the steps last night. (your dark hair reflected the beams of that hunter’s moon) You looked down, head tilted, smiling. You walked a few slow paces, stopped. I watched you move from the corner of my eye but did not turn to face you. My ears filled with the roar of my own heart’s blood and I heard nothing else. The...

I text her a photo: pictures of her life hang from clothespins on my kitchen wall. “It cracks me up that you took pics of all of the messy places,” she texts. “Those are all of the beautiful places,” I text back. And it’s true. Every corner of her home held beauty. All things burst green with the late northern spring in the Oran Valley. We stayed at her place...