In the swamp at night I hear old, long sounds and they ache in the air and I tuck my fears in the folds of my sleeping bag and stare out of the slit in the tent door at the flickering remnants of the fire like it is the only hope that the world still turns and wonder what warped misanthrope could possibly make a noise like that.

In the swamp at night, big-eyed and quickened, I remember things that never happened to me and I decide that something else’s dreams must be caught…

Sitting in a car on the street in front of the house of the man who's banging your wife is a fairly singular experience, even as solitude goes. It doesn't take long for the radio to get violently switched off, then switched back on again because the noise in your brain is shittier than the noise on the radio, then snatched back off again and you've got the knob in your hand and you rifle that thing into the floorboard so hard it bounces back into the back seat.

Then you take…

Chattanooga sorta sounds nonsensical, like something a lonely old man would mumble to his soup in the back booth of a diner, but it is a city and its streets spill off of a ridge and down into the winding iron water of the Tennessee River. There are bridges over the river, two for cars and one for feet, and the water under them abides boats large and small and the eyes of thousands who stare the way people stare at water, always like it is a new thing.

I stared at that water,…

Only a brown-eyed woman from a dusty, flat place could keep a promise like she made him. 

She had small hands, and as she sang they’d waved in the air like drunken waifs, gently restless, and her voice over that plain and the river behind and the people on their blankets in the grass and the night coming patiently over it all, warmly, the way a father might creep into the room of a sleeping child. Baseball would carry him away from that little fair and that honest Kansas…