Posting digital clippings and scraps of status on a Facebook page is a mysterious blend of personal confession and concerted performance conflating billboard and elevator phone call with street-corner soapbox watching one’s mirrored face and shaping expressions to achieve an affect’s effect while a camcorder runs behind the one-way glass of self-inflicted surveillance. David M.…

Anxiety lodges under my skin a splinter pricking a nerve when I tap my fingertip or brush it against my shirt I need emotional tweezers. David M. Frye April 20, 2009 Denton, Neb.

When oblique sunlight slices through streets in Sunday’s solitude even ordinary objects like a twisted juice box a rusted sign post a broken and barked stick cast transmogrified shadows across dewy pavement. David M. Frye April 19, 2009 Portland, Ore.

Once I learned how sea creatures died in prehistoric oceans fell like snow upon the depths and glaciated over millennia their calcified bodies forming limestone and marble depending upon pressure and time. I hold out no such hopes for the drifts of detritus blanketing the tables at Portland’s biggest garage sale: dusty blister packs of…

Once I took the day’s newspaper to my dad’s darkroom pulled the string on the light and arranged the comics page on the gridded green surface of the paper cutter lined up the Mark Trail comic with the edge of the cutter grabbed the blade’s handle and brought the cutter down slicing my left thumb…

No leaves on trees catch the plit of drops a cloud shakes its pinions dry and finds instead a flat of stone a back of dog a cheek of face baptizing earth and beast and man as night flutters into day and wind’s towel dabs skin and fur and rock leaving only a memory shed…

Water and hand and wheel raise a pot from a lump of clay. Slurry and hand and screen sift a page from a soup of wood. Heat and hand and hammer forge a leaf from a rod of iron. When hands touch and eyes behold, when minds recall and hearts embrace, then wood and iron…

I. Sunrise Meadowlark greets dawn Cormorants’ wings whispering Pond exhaling mists. II. Turkeys Twelve turkeys ambled along the gravel road taking both lanes and ditches ignoring the grinding of tires. III. Aftermath Twigs fractured and fallen lie scattered by storm’s winds and rest from skyward striving while on wet asphalt worms writhe and twist and…