Category Archives: Updates

sorry i didn’t call couldn’t force myself to pick . . up . . that . . fucking phone should’ve done that on the weekend but i’ve gotten through this shit before   didn’t work this time timing is everything … Continue reading →

My son’s thirtieth birthday. His mother turns sixty next week, and her mother, eighty, is coming to celebrate the dawn of the decades with us, them, me, and my other son who turns twenty-seven in April close to his brother’s … Continue reading →

Mornin’ Glory your cheery poem forced me to polish my rose colored lenses and watch some football maybe sip a glass of beer consider the whiskey anything but the fear pressing my lungs and heart flat as the lack of … Continue reading →

The doctors gave him six months six years ago. They called it a fiendishly aggressive melanoma,   eating away at his face and jaw. Each morning he packs the wound with cotton, applies the flesh   toned bandage — Phantom … Continue reading →

Sometimes the weight of the pen is too much to pick up, a rusted rail embedded in the ground,   so you keep going, walking, looking and listening for words to lift those bodies buried in your chest   as if … Continue reading →

When I go traveling in my mind to get away from shit, I climb the mountain above Alberton, scramble up to it—the meadow that sits atop those sheer cliffs overlooking the Clark Fork River. Only game trails lead there—each approach … Continue reading →

The hedge pods, lime green, hang in clusters like beans six to twelve feet above ground. Spindly shoots swoop-up off gnarled, woody stocks thick as my forearms. Insects, unseen, buzz-ring in my ears unperturbed by the lonely hound barking nonstop, … Continue reading →

I walk this rutted alley from The Club to Skeet’s Cafe with my son, dogging my grandpa’s hill-climbing heel, my old man’s voice in my head talking about my long dead punch-happy uncle whose clothes I still wear.   I … Continue reading →

at the crossroads again begging the bosses for work, some way to make it, easily,   a monthly grub-steak, a few bucks in exchange for me, my aging-marketable abilities,   whatever they may be, since I need money, shelter, time, … Continue reading →

this is it, that sweet (enough) amerikan dream of disability, social security, unemployment, or the lottery, some desperate way to stop punching a clock, give you a chance to stand outside under the stars, collect your thoughts, observe, come to … Continue reading →