Summer 2019

Interview: Margaret Renkl

Interview: Margaret Renkl

The shadow side of love is always loss, and grief is only love’s own twin,” Margaret Renkl writes in the opening pages of Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss, her memoir-in-micro-essays that was released earlier this year to glowing reviews.These wise, bracing words underpin the entire book, which…

Exeunt

So now it’s winter again yet sunrise and sunset make us forget so stunning the color spraying from ridges. In the icy clear brittle blue air above, the mountain greys like a grandmother, death strolls close by—the mundane maudlin. It would be fitting to go then. But you left in…

Just Off the Road

for James Still A man who’s old enough has earned the right to stop the car if, driving past some woods, the beauty so beguiles him he is drawn to wander under autumn’s changing leaves. And even if expected somewhere else he’ll now be late, we might do well to…

Without Ceasing

All day every day around the clock like a prayer vigil there should be poets writing poems, accounting for milkweed pods and old homesteads abandoned, poets stirring campfire ash, noting just the place along the shoreline the heron casts down, poets in shifts like monks praying grace upon the whole…

A Shared Space

in memory of Marie Melson She was already old from the first I knew her, and though I was a child, I had an oldness in me too, which neither of us saw the use in mentioning, as together we sat in a swing beneath a century-old oak. Her memories,…

Bearing Witness

When I was a boy, the bayou Bonne Idee flooded. I remember because my father and I walked on water. We had driven to the edge of our farm and discovered that the flood had enveloped our fishing dock, and when my father crossed the wooden deck just below the bayou’s surface, I…