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…

I am a yellow dandelion flower sprinkled by a gentle rain falling from gray stratus clouds, a blanket draped upon the land. The shower passes over, washing and watering me. I am a cotton dress shirt spotted by water droplets falling from the sprinkler top on an old Blue Nun bottle. The iron passes over,…

We bend words thin and pale at their points of flexion, our forearms shaking, but no filigree makes talk of chrysalides and butterflies grain and wheat emerge triumphant from oral caverns as the metaphor with shoulders broad enough to carry us across the chasm from death to life. We turn instead to exclamation– Christ is…

Hope sounds like meadow birds singing in the darkness before the rising of the sun, riffs entwined and floating like the bubbles Grandma made when she dipped her metal wand and spun in a circle, her arms outstretched, a trail of iridescent spheres arcing behind her hand, riding the spring breeze in the garden as…