Author: admin

Noon to moon the desert bakes: time-greyed tumbleweeds roll like Eastwood’s spaghetti westerns. Three hundred sixty degrees of sky stretch thunderously empty. Roads, where they exist, dance with wind-swirled dust, and boulders...

I find their empty shells, paired rough wings half buried in sand. Fallen angels. Dirty grey caskets lined with opalescent satin sheen. Youngsters are spat, past tense of spit; a rude name for this ingenious creature extracting...

My husband drives fourteen hours to explore this Mission, oldest in Texas,           enduring two centuries: repaired, relocated, even replaced –           victim of Rio Grande floods. Next door, at the Tiwa Cultural Center He...

He was a felon, but a nice one. Not exactly sure why he was sent up river, probably assault on a bar hopping night Released, he did odd jobs, tended bar, shared what was biting where, and tracked the weather to predict when...

In early morning a stone of stillness holds back dawn. Night begs to turn over and go back to sleep, but horned owls, have returned to roost. Small prey nest in peace. Songbirds perch poised for morning lullaby. In the coming...

Boots MacDuff, a riverman through and true, knew deep pools where walleye lie, best backwaters hiding bluegill. He was Boots, because in a family with a passel of kids, whoever got up first got to wear the boots, and he made...

When I was fourteen, when July burned the world flat and summer vacation began to fossilize, a boy, Robert, whom I had liked from science class, appeared at my front door, holding a string of freshly caught catfish and gave them...

My writing doesn’t have to awe you, bring you to your knees, no lightning strikes, no awards— Guggenheim, Pulitzer—no dozen or more men falling in love with me. My writing doesn’t have to spin me, make me feel exalted, accepted,...

Tropic to Bryce, then south to Hatch. Driving State Route 89. The freckled blur of cottonwoods, old trucks, weathered swing sets as we exceed the limit through Glendale. So many miles we’ve traveled these past few years—the car...

On rare Sundays when my preacher father had nothing clerical to do, homiletics gave way to aesthetics and he took my sister and me to the art museum in Youngstown, Ohio, which, for all its imposing façade, had only four small...

Oh, the past, you used to say, forget it but I did not, my art, re-fleshing words like some sort of Jesus doing pop-up resurrections: Rise, take up thy bed and stalk. And the odor of re-vivification— Lazarus slouching from the...