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“Osprey,” I said in my thoughts. “I’d like to see you again. Where are you, Osprey?” And at that moment the osprey flew off the river-wind and into a maple tree. Without stopping, or even slowing, she tore off a branch and fastened it in her talons. “For her nest,” I thought. “I’ll see…
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I sat by the water, among the ducks and the geese. The stream, milky and deep, sifted into the river. I watched the reflections of newly unfurled cottonwood trees get caught in its currents. As I turned my head, an osprey poured forth from the sun, its wings a mask, patterned and finely painted. Twice…
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We live among constant change, and we only notice it when we’ve been away. After two weeks abroad, I return home to find that the first crescents of spring have, well—blossomed. The osoberry, the first bush to sleep and to awake, is draped in full regalia. The creekside is speckled through with waterleaf, one…
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In some ways the trees are as unknowable as the stars. Here they are, tangible secrets, immense suns and mountains that are somehow alive before us. Let us feel their comfort and their power, and call them small deities, for here the stars have fallen at our feet, and look how mindlessly we stomp over them.
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I remember the night we heard the coyotes. It was summer, or almost summer, and I was still a teenager. Although long past sunset, the sky wasn’t yet at its darkest, and the air through my open window smelled like dusk. As I tried to sleep I listened to the outside. Car brakes. Fountain. Creek…
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Shoe obsessions. Purse collections. Homes carefully decorated with curated furniture. Counter-tops strewn with make-up, nail polish, hair products, and lotions. Perfume-soaked magazines plump with clothes to buy and styles to emulate. In America, we equate femininity with consumerism. It’s well known that advertisers build upon our insecurities–and oftentimes invent new ones for us–and then offer…
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This was all once alive. The abrupt smell of pavement was once the citrusy soil, the slight tingle of fermentation, undeniably sweetened by aging leaves of hemlock and maple, dark orange and a flat, slippery sort of yellow. Insects, bacteria, the microbiome. Once, long ago, the early evening brought robins together on tight tree…
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There’s this nostalgia I feel when I walk along the river. I feel it also when I watch half-cloudy sunsets, and when I look for Orion and Canis major on winter nights. The cold sinks through my wool slippers as I stand on the concrete deck alongside my house. I tighten my robe’s sash and squint. Fuzz…
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The poet Robert Service, according to my high school English teacher, has always been considered more of a word-rhymer than a literary artist. “This isn’t really what we would call quality poetry,” my teacher said when I asked her to approve my choice of poem. Our senior year assignment was to memorize and recite a poem to the class.…