And this is his sofa, is it? by Chris Clarke
Water flat as glass. I dip the left blade of my paddle into it. It makes no sound. The right blade makes no sound. Then the left. The sun has not yet risen. Caspian terns regard us sidelong, dive with...
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Pleiades by Chris Clarke
There’s a thin haze on the sky tonight, so I can only see the Pleiades through my peripheral vision. The fall constellations are parading again. The Pleiades rise in the east, and then an hour or so...
View ArticleSalt Creek by Chris Clarke
Breathe. Strands of gray-green Ramalina lichen, torn treetop lace, fall at my feet. I crane my neck backward, scan the sky. Only the swaying spruce and Douglas fir, the crash of surf seven hundred...
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These three things happened
Thing one. My colleague Matt and I were sitting in the shade of a black locust on a Southern California Indian reservation week before last, watching some dogs. The dogs were boisterous mutts who’d...
View ArticleHabitat loss
I want to go back to this little place I know, on the east side of Route 14 in Mojave, California called Reno’s Coffee Shop. I had homemade turkey soup there once two days after Thanksgiving. The...
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Orion rising
In retrospect, I must have been under for a very long time, until long after I tired of splitting my fingernails on the underside of the ice. Until I forgot what it was to have lungs that didn’t ache,...
View ArticleOakland
At 80th and East 14th, ragged tents line the sidewalk. Last time I was there, they weren’t. Comfortable men talk over coffee at the Alameda Natural Grocery: a friend flipped a 2-bedroom for 750K. New...
View ArticleLight
A block east of where I stood along this cactus-fringed road tonight, a streetlight cast a yellow inverted cone toward the dirt. I stand well outside the light. A few months shy of 40, before the last...
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Blue Rodeo
In 1989 you reached Barstow by driving the two-lane past worn out alfalfa fields, rotten barbed wire seining plastic bags from the desert wind, fences of decaying schoolbuses. At 45 per in the ancient...
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2017
Arthur D. Clarke and unspecified grandchild, 1960 My grandfather comes to me in pieces; The angle of a plywood sign nailed to a tree, my worn work boots on my porch in Richmond. I never call him up...
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