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Farmhouse By The Highway

The hardest thing about death, my mother said, is when you stop remembering what drove you mad. Like the way my father typed one key at a time, or how he spit in his hands to smooth cowlicks in his hair.

Bat Season

These were strange and intoxicating expeditions. At the cliff-lined ends of forest-service roads or the edges of muddy cattle tanks, or in the cricket-loud groves where saguaros gave way to oaks, I would help stretch nets on moonless evenings. Bats fluttered into the thin weave and were trapped, toothy and screaming.

The Great Decline

Shanna Swan On The Worldwide Drop In Fertility

Frisch: You found about a 1 percent decline in sperm counts per year.

Swan: Yes, which would mean a 50 percent decline over fifty years. We’re actually seeing something a little steeper than that.

Sunbeams

The emergence of intelligence, I am convinced, tends to unbalance the ecology. In other words, intelligence is the great polluter. It is not until a creature begins to manage its environment that nature is thrown into disorder.

Clifford D. Simak, Shakespeare’s Planet

Siri Tells A Joke

My husband had been sick long enough, a string of years, that I’d begun to think of his diagnosis as a rumor. He was interminably terminally ill. Until he wasn’t.

Ten Years Sober

We all need to accept that the world at large is indifferent to our existence. Most of our decisions matter only to us. I could drink tonight, and no one would know.

Four Poems From Ancient China

Call next door, ask / neighbors on the west if they can spare / any wine, and suddenly a jarful comes / across the fence — fresh, unfiltered. We / open mats beside Meandering River’s / long currents, crystalline winds arrive, / and you’re startled it’s already autumn.