Jack and I sat like gods on nice, flat chair-sized rocks right outside the mouth of the mine shaft. We looked down and watched the two idiots hop across the mossy creek stones. Sure enough, the fat one slipped and landed on his butt. I looked at Jack. He shook his head, took a short nip out of the pint bottle, and tucked it in the back pocket of his jeans. I didn’t consider that to be a safe place to store a glass bottle, especially when you’re inside a mountain, mining gold. My little brother isn’t as smart as me though.
The idiots finally made it across the creek and started climbing up the slag pile. They didn’t look like much, but that’s what you get when you recruit your help out of the Crazy Horse Saloon.…
They thought they buried her beneath silence, beneath shame, beneath the twisted shadows of what was never her fault.
A girl, broken open before she knew what “no” could mean. Her innocence wasn’t lost it was stolen, stripped by hands that never knew the weight of consequence.
But still, she breathed. Each day she woke with trembling limbs and fractured dreams, but she woke.…
I see them vaguely in the darkness. Their eyes glow green in the firelight and their sharp white teeth shine hungrily in their wide mouths, plumes of steamy breath floating forcefully into the frigid air. They wait. They are patient, but I can see the desire in their dreadful grimaces, in the long, slow strings of saliva descending from chin to ice-covered snow.
I watch the play of the fire as the harsh wind gusts past the slim shelter of the overhang, pushing the blaze nearly flat, threatening to shrink it to nothing. Then the gusts abate briefly, and the flames flare upward again. Icicles melt slowly from the stone roof. The drops hiss as they plop into the flames. I feel no heat. My legs are frozen, and the numbness spreads slowly up my torso.…
The day was gray and calm. The river, a sheet of ripple-less obsidian, stretched before Alan and his stepson, Travis. Alan’s line was taught in the water, the pole pinned between two large rocks, while Travis’s pole laid between the fishermen as Alan fed line through the eyelet of a treble hook. Alan worked his thick fingers around each other with gentle precision a couple of times to complete the knot.
“Livers, please,” Alan said, studying the hook in his hand and giving it a tug to test the knot.
Travis extended the open container, Alan retrieving a slippery liver from the soup with a slurp.
“Closer ‘er up,” said Alan, massaging the treble hook into the liver, then calling for string.
Travis riffled through the tackle box before extending a spool.…
I lie in the belly of my bed like a flame dying in a pool of wax— ponder if Mother Earth will be swallowed by the ocean as she boils in a belly
of poison. Outside my window I hear her crying raindrops, and I am crying too. Her heavy clouds spew a flood of water, fill the ground, rage rivers, melt soil,
and crumble rocks. Even as she suffers, she is still more powerful than us. She knows humanity will die before her. Her thunder blasts a distant horn—tells me
I know how to strike a match—begs me to ignite this sunken Earth mother’s flame and make her new.
Author’s Note: “Put a Match to It” ignites the opening of a collection I am working on, setting the tone with its focus on climate change and the resilience of Mother Earth.…
Ella M. Peebles & Leah Bainbridge (Photo: Ella M. Peebles)
When I first began the process for Watch Us Begin, it was simply going to be a pamphlet of what I considered to be some of my best poems. A few months later, it became a fully-fledged collection, with each poem complimented by an illustration by my best friend, Leah Bainbridge. There was something oddly poetic about the fact that Leah accompanied me on this creative journey, as she has been a present, and unwavering support throughout the emotional journey that this collection tracks.
I write poetry, quite simply, to express myself. Over the years, this has become increasingly important to me, as my poems are an amalgamation of words and thoughts that I struggle to express with any real clarity.…
“Dad, you need a new For Rent sign. The edges are torn. The letters are faded.”
“This’ll do the job,” Leo said. He smiled at Alan to soften his tone. “I’m renting your apartment, not the sign.”
Leo finished taping the tattered For Rent sign to the front door of his two-flat. His son and daughter-in-law were moving to California. They’d asked him to move with them, and if he could’ve moved his home too, he would have gladly left Chicago.
It’s not that he didn’t like Chicago. He’d been born and raised on the city’s south side. The winters, though, were getting harder. Los Angeles weather would be kinder. But he couldn’t leave his two-flat. The two-flat was where he and his wife had raised their boy.…
