Browse Topics
Identity
Why I Moved To The Country
I moved to the country after living in Oakland, California, for the better part of twenty-five years, adoring and defending my troubled city as if it were my wayward though generous lover.
January 2013
Salida
At the beginning of my senior year in high school, I was sixteen years old, six foot one, and 155 pounds. I had just gotten my braces off, though no one had noticed yet. In the morning at the breakfast table I studied the box scores in the sports section of the San Diego Union. Then I checked the score of the Vietnam War, presented daily as a body count, ours versus theirs.
December 2012
Role Models
A pair of Nunn Bush dress shoes, a newspaper route, a game of Crazy Eights
October 2012
The Camel
I grew up in a village in southern Lebanon a few years after World War II, the “Big War,” as we called it. In that place nothing came between us and the world we lived in, and in that world there was always blood, lots of it. We slaughtered the animals we ate.
October 2012
Selected Poems
— from “Reading Lu Yu in Winter” | I wonder how he was able to bear the cold of China, / Traveling the rivers and outpost roads. / The fires he wrote about were always small, / A few willow twigs or scraps of bark.
October 2012Pioneers
We checked out of the motel and ate breakfast in an old diner next to a gas station. Teresa ordered a child’s portion of pancakes, and they came with a whipped-cream smiley face. I ordered a skillet named after a World War II battleship.
August 2012The Long Bag We Drag Behind Us
When we were one or two years old we had what we might visualize as a 360-degree personality. Energy radiated out from all parts of our body and all parts of our psyche. A child running is a living globe of energy.
August 2012excerpted from
Memories, Dreams, Reflections
The more uncertain I have felt about myself, the more there has grown up in me a feeling of kinship with all things. In fact it seems to me as if that alienation which so long separated me from the world has become transferred into my own inner world, and has revealed to me an unexpected unfamiliarity with myself.
July 2012Grimace In The Burnt Black Hills
After six states, 1,300 miles, and almost twenty-four hours, the iron tang of blood and bleach still hadn’t blown out of my truck. And that’s saying something because since the fire I can’t hardly smell dog shit if I step in it.
July 2012
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