ISSUE THREE - SPRING 2020
These days, with most of us stuck in seclusion, one could say the range has expanded its reach: invaded the city, spilled over from grasslands to concrete. The clichés of the West’s big sky and vast spaces — austere, remote, devoid of human presence — feel suddenly everywhere proximate …
One Poem
These primordial tiles, date palms squared in the icy atrium // A land not mine, but like mine // I moved my life toward it …
Two Poems
We opened dams / long-before dismantled every human structure / save one / We planned for the sake of land returning / we surveyed daily / we worked the land …
Four Poems
Who owns the river and the currents / on either side of writing our stories, / myths where everyone dies hating / the land but loving the earth? …
Ho Boys
A little more than a decade ago, toward the end of another unpopular president’s tenure, I found myself working on a construction crew in my hometown of Boulder, Colorado …
High Country
My research project concerns the oral histories of American veterans of World War II, like my father was, and their reentry into civilian life after 1945 …
Resound
There may have been a no trespassing sign, but we never saw it. The snow on this February day in central Idaho was over four feet deep …
Five Poems
I hope to turn amputations into jasmines // the way a mining field turns its copper / into skullcaps. Even tradition // could not save my grandfather / from another man’s knife …
Not Eagle, Not Star
The thing about you, your father likes to say, is that you’re dumber than the barnacles on a whale’s ass. Which shouldn’t hurt when you think about it …
Apollo
In West Texas at night, the sky blinks with a thousand red eyes from the lights at the center of wind turbines. These lights are meant to ward off low-flying planes …
One Poem
There are ten-thousand ways a desert can gut you; ten-thousand ways water finds the smallest openings to create a crack in the stone, a flash flood …
Neither Here nor There
My partner and I rented a cramped two-bedroom apartment in Riverside, California. Our building was surrounded by eucalyptus trees with menthol-scented branches …
Ceres
The blink of an eye, a millisecond of shadow. A bird or passing cloud. Aprile didn’t have time to think of anything else …