A rough row of trees, mulberry and locust and hackberry, angles nearly south by west on the brome-blanketed slope too small to earn the name “hill.” Entwined among the trees and stumps run the rusted traces of an abandoned barbed wire fence bearing the marks of past owners– patches and fortifications. One iron post punctuates…

What makes a poem a poem and not a piece of prose? Is the spark a glint in readers’ eyes as they pass across the page? Or does the destiny of words descend from tip of poet’s pen? Beauty finds life in the beholder’s eye. We know it when we see it. Perhaps poetry emerges…

In today’s Holocene epoch, Nebraska lies far from the ocean, but the dry grassy stems of last season’s brome shift and sift into a sandy beach through eyes slitting and squinting. I lie on my back in the field, crunching the brittle blades, and close my eyes. The sun, tame at this distance, warms my…

So much of a story’s telling depends upon a strong beginning, a word that declares here is the root, the foundation; know this and you begin well. A brazen bisection to place upon a page words that enliven a thought, a memory, that speak a mused image, but also in silent negation declare all else…