JP's Page

I started the summer by breaking four vertebrae, two ribs, and my heart - the by-products of my own recklessness with a horse and with a woman.

The moment after impact, that’s when you’re at your lowest - crawling through self-pity and unsettled dust, sucking for breath that won’t seem to fit back in your chest, and wondering how bad it is in the places you can’t see, the important places.

There are sleepless nights as the pain constantly reminds you not to move, not to think, and it envelopes… Continue

I’ve seen the lights of his tractor in a cloud of dust on Mulberry Creek on a heavy June night.

I’ve seen his truck parked in the ditch before sun up in April with the stock trailer empty, he and his horse already gone.

I’ve seen him chopping cedars on a dead August day under a sun that drags itself across the hilltops.

I’ve seen him through a frosted windshield in January with time for only a two-fingered wave as he rolls past to go feed, his gaunt face grinning beneath the brim of a stained… Continue

Even when his mother told him, he could only reply, “yeah.”

It took another woman to get the words from him he could never bring himself to give to anyone else, and now he doesn’t want them back.

He sees clearly what he had already known – that talk is a curse.

He sees his father was right in the chore-time advice beaten rough-handed into his head from childhood.

If you have to be told, you’re not worth talking to.

So he wires the gate fast behind and walks out into the cooling eveni… Continue

Humidity and heat
Haze the distant treelines
Into antique photographs,
Grainy and unfocused.

Chocolate and foam-choked,
The flood slides at you,
And you wallow
Against its progress.

To a mulberry logjam
In wet-dark jeans, feeling
Under and back
For the slick sides
With naked feet.

One hand
In the woodrasp mouth,
And one
In the flaring gillplate
Before the surface
Churns with the ugly
Yellow head.

Baling-twine
Her to your belt,
And she pulls,
Wanting to take you
Over and down
Away from this
N… Continue

Affranchised by Friday’s whistle,
We circle the boot-sucking pond edge
Behind cones of yellow light
Hung with dancing mayflies.

Drunk, sweating, and armed
With broomstick tridents
And electric torches –
A peasant uprising
Witnessed by lantern-eyed cattle
And distant, silent lightning.

Pale heads dot the shore,
Hungry eyes star-ward,
And prongs drive them
Back into the muck,
Feet from their birth.

Back into the dewing grass,
We carry dripping
Our sacks of plunder,
To another tallboy for the ri… Continue