A thread of sky breaks through the trees. Meriwether Lewis, Captain of the Corps of Discovery Expedition, strides out of the shadow and into the light. Raising his free hand, he shades his eyes and overlooks a great grassy plain. The Captain can see the sapphire Missouri River snaking toward the snowclad southern mountains.
He turns his attention to vast flocks of young geese. The birds have become completely feathered in all areas except for one crucial spot.
Their wings still lack the feathers needed for flight.
Descending the hill, Captain Lewis plans a hike to the bend in the Missouri that he had spotted from above. Rounding a boulder, there are at least one thousand buffalo grazing and drinking on the river.
Captain Lewis stands his 1792 Contract Short Rifle upright on the western wheatgrass.…
my dad died two days before trump was sworn in for the second time. i’m not sure i ever saw myself in his face but i thought I’d at least recognize the pieces of me that came from him. etched somewhere against the life he’d lived and the things he saw. maybe side by side id be able to ware down the hardness of his eyes and see them in my own. I’m still a child, his child, one that has not known much else but ease, and ease looks different, it feels different. ease to me is, never being limited. I think your hardness came from the potential for so much more. the things you didn’t get to live and the things you didn’t get to see.…
My life changed with a boring car ride. “Dad, the film isn’t ready,” I said from the backseat. “Want me to put it together?”
Three more hours of driving separated us and Springfield, Missouri, and I wanted to watch film of the other teams in the Midwest Showcase tournament at Hammons Field, not YouTube videos of big leaguers breaking down swings and pitching mechanics. Been there, done that.
“Nah,” my dad, and coach, replied. “No need for you to spend your time on that, I’ll do it when we get to the hotel. You could watch some pitching mechanics videos.”
I frowned at the back of his shaved head and looked out the window. Dad had uploaded video clips to the Dreamz Teamz app, and technically, me and my teammates could watch them.…
G. R. was dreaming if you could call it that. It was more of a nightmare. He knew he was a caterpillar. He could get around, but the immediate stages before left a lot to be desired. In his dream he was tied up by some bratty kid in a weird contraption slowly turning over and over: one side he’s up: a tiny egg stuck on some shitty leaf and then it flipped and he’s a pupa stuck inside his own shell. Talk about the mother of nightmares. And he’s a little runt to top it off. Oh, I’ll get even. Just wait until I wake up and come out of my cocoon. Tsetse flies will be considered chump change.
I walk past the same corner each day where I would sit between classes and talk to you, where the skateboarder nearly collided into me as you spoke of your old friend who was dying of cancer but wouldn’t stop smoking and I complained of my anemia how I barely had the energy to stand in front of a class for thirty minutes
And all the time I was wondering how much longer we could keep it going because this was a thing we had been doing for twenty years without ever agreeing to or addressing it because that might entail giving it up…
The title 1000 Pieces of Time provides insight into the author’s concerns: time, mortality, and imagination.
Clock time goes forward. A person is born and dies in clock time. What to do faced with the inevitable? The poet confronts mortality with imagination. His speaker finds beauty, Botticelli’s Venus, on a travel poster in a window on a block of boarded up stores. Venus looks downcast, “as if she knew / how beauty could be stolen / how winter always crushes spring.” With imagination a child, Mary, teaches a rooster to walk backwards in “Walking Backwards.” Today she is immortalized in her stories, in a book titled The Complete Stories, by Flannery O’Conner. “The Sweater,” is set in the present. The detail of “a thread unraveling / on the sleeve of a shirt” evokes a poignant memory of the poet’s grandmother’s life.…
As she sat bent over, in the least-smudged chair of my garden set, my sister told of a neighbour who styled his garden —its stubborn hedges and out-of-average-reach trees— with hair tweezers and nail clippers (for feet).
As she drank her coffee, cross clover continued to unroot the grass, and drunk wasps circled ground-struck apricots, while unimpeachable ivy succeeded in suffocating the “permanent” plants in the borders—green nooses left unseen.
As my eyes grazed over the playfully growing decay, I knew she wasn’t talking about my nature and though I already had my answer, I still asked my sister— ‘You think the garden has something to say[?]’
