Chris Dombrowski
Chris Dombrowski is heartened by his English setter puppy and Roberto Bolaño’s novels. His latest book is The River You Touch. He lives in Missoula, Montana, where he is Director of Creative Writing at the University of Montana.
The Coast of Nowhere II
Sleet and black rain / pelting the eaves, the kind of predawn / that reaches through the window, hissing, / Your heart never was a bird let alone / a bright-red singing one.
April 2026Three
My friend says that a life properly lived is like a river. I take this to mean that headlong shots through roaring box canyons are inevitable, along with meandering, wandering main channels and high, roiling waters. There will be drought-drained shallows in which trout languish; winter, when the dark water is a spill of ink down the page of snow; and eddies, too, the hypnotic, elliptical movement of water running back on itself, around and around.
July 2014Weekly Apocalyptic, Or Poem Written On The Wall In An Ascending Space Capsule
We had to stop what we were doing / to see what we had done. Thing was, / we wouldn’t.
December 2012My Anti-Zen Zen
What’s befuddling is that I can’t figure out whether our days are passing at warp speed or at a geologic pace. If I could gain some distance on them, they would probably resemble a large Western river in runoff: so brimming at the banks that the casual observer might think the water is moving leisurely over stones, but soon a cottonwood trunk or fence post comes hurtling past, and the current’s true velocity becomes evident.
August 2011The Oar: A Summer In Three Acts
I had anchored my boat on an inside bend of the snowmelt-fed Rock Creek. Whoever christened that body of water a “creek” had clearly never attempted to cross it in June, when the burly current threatens to unfoot the knee-deep wader.
December 2010Has something we published moved you? Fired you up? Did we miss the mark? We’d love to hear about it.
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