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Sunbeams

I knew a pair of Persian cats once; the black one always reclined on a white cushion on the couch, and the white one on the black cushion next to it. It wasn’t just that they wanted to leave cat hair where it showed up best, though cats are always thoughtful about that. They knew where they looked best.

Ursula K. Le Guin

Conversations With A Banana Spider

The smell of wild honeysuckle was everywhere, and the mango trees sagged with the weight of their fruit. I’d often hear the ripe ones fall to the street with a heavy, wet thud, or else bang off the metal roofs of outbuildings where homeless wanderers sometimes slept. This abundance of fruit made Loreto seem like an impossible place to starve, yet I saw a few souls who looked like they were trying their best to do just that. Was it legal, I wondered, to simply reach up and pull a ripe mango from someone else’s tree? Being a foreigner with money, I didn’t need to find out.

Like Love Is A Heart

I hate it / when they do that. Like I’m easy / to love. Like love is a heart / he can sit behind / the wheel of, drive / through town, windows / down, dog and girl along / for the ride, as if he’ll never / ever change his mind.

Classroom Hatch

I try to feed the chicks mealworms from my hands, / crouching there sometimes for hours. // I can’t remember how / to make them believe in kindness.

A Thousand Words

A Thousand Words features photography so rich with narrative that it tells a story all on its own.

To the Arresting Officer

You patted me down roughly, went through my pockets and pulled out three crumpled twenties, some guitar picks, my stepfather’s pocketknife. “You got drugs, son?”

Canada Day

The drive from Homer, Alaska, to Casper, Wyoming, is more than three thousand miles, much of it on winding two-lane highways where moose and bears slip from the underbrush and stand in the road. It had already been a rough trip.