• THE CLIMB

    Life should be a like a mountainalthough truth be told, weprefer it more like a prairieor at best a gentle, rolling hill. There is a challenge to climbing,hell maintaining a grip halfwayup most mountains, andthere are no maps, nowell worn paths, you justgo up until you cannotgo up higher then youfigure out how to come…


  • LANDING

    She sends us a map showing on which tribe’s land we are now living. This is not something we have thought about, not something we want to think about, for that would demand that we are the usurpers, the horde whose pogrom was ultimately successful, and that is a face that refuse to see in…


  • A TWISTED ROAD

    Walking down the helicalroad, untwisting as you goyou discover placesyou never imagingedvisiting, nothinglike the path youthought you knew well. Stop and claimyour new heritage,find yourselfon an alien map,bury yourself in booksof new and ancient history. Pause here and considera King of Scotland,knights and lords,in the far distanceknow that you claima link to a manso honored…


  • CARTOGRAPHY

    On the map are neatly etched lines drawn by a fine stylus in a skilled hand separating blue from yellow. This soil is cinnamon there tending to mahogany no line, only a post here, one there and a gun emplacement to deter those who cannot see a line writ on water. In the wind the…


  • A POINTED REPLY

    Between this point and that lies a vast uncharted space noted on every cartographers chart. If you ask how this could be possible, I reply it’s like listening to silence and hearing each sound deeply embedded in the one next to it, a glissando of what exactly? Uncertainty? That is the whole point in the…


  • DIRECT ROUTE

    He would rather be from somewhere. Where he is or is not going matters very little to him now, he will be where he will be, will go where he needs or wants to go or is taken, and when there, that is where he should be, so being there is no problem. But until…


  • DISCOVERY

    In a small storefront, in an older neighborhood of the city, I found it.  Sepia coated with a fine sheen of dust and neglect, it lay on the table amid a stack of others, as though a leaf of phyllo in a poorly made stack fresh from the oven.  I knew it as I looked…