photograph by Wayne Stadler General Objective: To provide the students with an opportunity to study the skeletons of numerous animals they find in the ecosystem. Background Information: It is quite common for biologists studying wildlife populations to examine skeletal fragments to determine aspects of a species’ natural history . . . In order to learn […]
Winner of the 2014 Nelligan Prize for Short Fiction, selected by Kent Nelson In black and white, two men as silhouettes at a distance across a sea of sand. A donkey between them, their outlines hazy in the blaze of day. The sky is a solid mass of barely blue, and a blur on the […]
Listen to our podcast of this story here. Nights when Polk cannot hunt the dogs, he instead attacks his father. He has grown to crave the hot pain spreading over his face, the bulging of his knuckles when they connect with bone. His father fights back just enough. They roll around on the floor, […]
Imagine this scene from The Bad Seed: two ladies drooping, lily-like, in a nineteen-fifties living room. No pillow is out of place. Each woman is devastated. Hortense Daigle because her little boy was killed, the other woman because her little girl murdered him. Mrs. Daigle is liquored up good. She exits her grief long enough […]
Listen to our podcast of this essay here. Heading west out of Kalispell, US-2 passes a Smith’s grocery store, some mom and pop casinos, and billboards in the yards of half-built homes before the land opens into wide fields. They are spring flooded: fence posts planted in water, horses and cattle relegated to the […]
Now I recognize everyone I have ever seen. For instance, on the walk over here I heard two men discussing how hot one of them was one night—the one man thought the other was very hot but the hot-that-night man didn’t think he was at his hottest. I saw one man walking while holding a […]
No matter the size of window, nor the contrary force with which it resists, when the window breaks the outcome is evening. There is only one method for self-reflection. To achieve a quiet mind you must first hear it speak. Then you must talk back to your mind until you talk it to death. […]
The winter mirages ride in on the back of the third snow, or maybe the fourth. It is the snow after the snow when we stop using numbers to measure each drift, when we start dressing without looking outside. The air is cold beyond counting, a reeducation. Constant pulsing of white. Wind scrapes each used […]
i. to make one thing of me, writes Rilke or to “work me, Lord” as Janis sings like a field song, mocking -bird variations for which I can find no equivalent, and no sooner have I written this down than I want to post it on a screen where I can see all manner of […]
Flower-bordered river where I fillet the hyacinths, a russian doll of places posing as one place. Halogen me at a horse show in Florida while another juliennes olives for appetizers. A doll slipped in another till all dolls are dull: versions of me with whistles for lips reciting asterisks in the periodic table. Collage of […]