“I got a new hip, you know, one of them ones they pound into your leg bone, all made outta titaynum and shit, boom, boom, boom,” he said, swinging an air hammer like he was pounding a spike into an old hickory stump. “Two weeks later I fell on that side and the titaynum ball popped out of its socket, and, boy, I’m here to tell ya that hurt like the dickens, screwed my eyes shut and screamed for help, and they popped it back in, but something ain't quite right yet. I live in a adult foster…

I spent so much of my time drunk, trying to forget rather than remember. One glass, one pouring, one swallow – the first – was one too many. And then there was the world, and the people in it, and they all had to be dealt with, one way or another. Had there been less pain to anesthetize perhaps things would have turned out differently. Maybe then I would have learned to cipher numbers and tracts of physical formulae; draw diagrams and landscapes and faces in lead; read and write literature,…

A pair of robins built a new nest outside the window where I write. The nest is well camouflaged in a tall cedar bush that I bonsai’d a year ago. The nest is perfectly formed: rough on the outside, smooth and comfortable on the inside, where two sky blue eggs rest, waiting.  

Blue jays pay as much attention to the nest as the eggs’ parents, but from a greater distance. I watch the blue jays with as much trepidation as an expectant father. When the jays work up enough nerve to approach…

Jay K. was walking through a wood, breaking parched twigs underfoot, rustling brittle leaves recently fallen from bare limbs. He tried to open his senses to nature's paradoxical courses: the smell of fresh air mixed with decaying organics; the sound of flowing water he dared not sip; a cool breeze on his hot face. 

He saw a deer standing motionless in a clearing, staring at him, then bolting away so fast he wondered if it had been there to begin with -- or if it had been apparition.…