Photo by Boston Public Library / CC BY-NC 2.0 We show our love by slurping oysters, three dozen to be exact—two dozen raw and unadorned, a dozen served “dirty,” splattered with sour cream, red onion and red lump caviar. All doused with lemon and Tabasco. Dad and I are...
Less than 100 yards down the sloughthis swamp’s so thick it’s easy to imagine a world where carsdon’t exist, where a breeze is worth more than gold.The water under your boat, the mess of palmettos lining the shore,the bald cypress blocking sun— everything, all of it,...
Pull your boat up to the shore here nowwith hundreds of pelicans in flight above the island, their nests scatteredin the mangrove bushes all over this place, and you’d never guessit was a ghost of itself five years ago, just a ring of stone with barely enoughgrass to...
My feet are cold. They remind me of that one week in Iowa. I look at my feet. I don’t like to think about that week in Iowa. It was not a good week in Iowa. I keep looking at my feet. They are covered in cotton—frayed and tubed. I can feel every inch of me forgetting...
Photo by City of Albuquerque / CC BY-NC 2.0 I saw a man shapeshift into a coyote. It happened at the part of the trail that bends closest to the river, you know, by the burned clearing with the white tree trunk and everyone’s initials in ash. The man squatted naked in...
My parents were into birding. When they came to Arizona to visit me, we would always stop at the Gilbert Riparian Preserve to see what birds were there. I fell in love with the place, so went there on my own too. People fish in the front pond. Unfortunately, they can...
