It was a bitter cold night in March 2015 when a certain sage-grouse female’s (SGF) life changed forever. That night she was designated “SGF4601” and thereafter, her movements would be closely monitored for the rest of her life. After being gently captured, she was fitted with a GPS “backpack” and released. Until her death four years later, her life was scrutinized by biologists, adding to our understanding of sage-grouse behaviors and their habitat. –Morelli, “A Year in the Life of an Idaho Sage-Grouse”
When I awoke, I was different. Or the world I lived in had changed. Or both.
Something was behind me, over me, on me. I could not see it, but I could feel it covering me so I knew it was there—something with a thin, hard-edged shape that I could not slip free of or away from, try as I might.…
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and when it touches down, all the meteorologists call it unprecedented.
I wonder when they stopped watching the news and only reported it. No one remembers
how to cry. Is it true that a single generation of monarchs make the return trip north?
That to step on one will change the future? How then, do I
translate the capsized boats? The shadeless neighborhoods? The wooden boxes
made to hold a child? Some days, I think about pockets
lined with milkweed and hemlock. Other days, I follow an old trail
across Texas to scoop sunflower seeds from my grandmother’s hands.
– Amanda Roth…
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I was twenty-two when I drove to the storage unit where my best friend’s belongings were. She was also twenty-two, although unlike me, permanently twenty-two. It had been less than two months since her death, and already a new year. I was there to help her mom sort through her things and empty the unit. On the day we drove there to clear it out, the persistent rain had paused. It was the first day that week without torrential downpour.
We arrived that Friday afternoon at the All-Size to assess the situation. The building consisted of long hallways leading into doorways, a dark motel of belongings. Located on the second floor, the unit was positioned between what felt like endless rows of others. We had an hour before closing to enter the locker and plan our attack.…
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It was very early in the morning when I caught the bus. Afraid I wouldn’t make it on time, I left my apartment an hour early. I took the most circuitous route to the bus stop; call me old-fashioned, but I find relying on my instincts at the pitch of stress to be much more reliable than aimlessly trusting my phone to lead the way. Even if I have to rush through alleys overhung with baby-orange clouds of aurora, through obscure neighborhoods, or through streets mostly deserted but for the occasional silhouette in a top hat who would cross the street from afar to avoid passing by me, I still feel at greater ease at least knowing how I got to where I needed to go.…
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The bootlegger’s is a pinched, dim shack, surrounded by brush, set adrift from a wiry dirt road that’s barely perceptible from the main artery. But the boy could find his way to it in the darkest dark, so familiar is the beaten path that leads to the shack’s wooden, whining door. He would never venture alone to this place, a place that renders his stomach watery with dread; he goes because his heart is strung taut to his father, a man who treats the shack like a ruinous mistress.
Today, it’s just before noon, and there are only four people in the bar, because it’s a Sunday morning and it’s too early in the day for a drink for most. The bartender Jenny is wearing a peachy-pink lipstick that makes her skin seem sallow rather than enlivened, and though the boy knows she’s younger than most of the people he sees in this place, there is something aged about the way her eyes recede behind thick circles of black makeup.…
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We met in the third grade, the same year I started parochial school at Our Lady of the Rosary. We weren’t friends at first. Not that we weren’t friendly, but we weren’t close the first year, nor the second. K was one of the class originals, the ones who had been together since kindergarten, and I was one of two new kids. K was friendly enough to jump rope and hopscotch with the girls, and cool enough to play basketball with the boys. I didn’t play any of the games well enough to know, but she was good at both from what I could tell. She never wore uniform plaid, or pleated skirts with bike shorts like the other girls in our class did. She wore the same polos and khakis as the boys, and I liked that.…
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Downtown’s ash trees are wrapped in green
Marked so we know the emerald ash borer
Is slouching this way.
The Mongols once had flung whole trees at Baghdad
As they sieged the city, symbols for its citizens
That the end was near, and now I’m
Looking at the dead bough that hangs over our house
Branches peeling off in thunderstorms
New dead dendrites each morning.
Doesn’t the neighborhood smell great, he said,
With all those lindens in bloom?
But they found the ash borer in Omaha,…
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