When someone tells me a story, even a newspaper headline, I ask, “Where was that? Where did that happen?” From the context—the who, the where, and the when—I construct meaning. I believe I’m not alone. We have a fundamental desire to understand our environments, to understand how they affect who we are and what we care about.
All day those stones have writhed with myth,
roots have snaked necks, have had the cheek
to prod gods and kings, crack armies, cities, ships;
mocked Shiva, made him sprout arthritic wrists.
By DON SHARE
Rabbit fur and hair strewn through the lawns
of the Midwest!
The famous feral parakeets of Chicago
are chattering
With cold.
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I have a bone to pick
with whoever runs this joint.
I don’t much like
being stuck out in the rain
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Hobo, Bono, boneheap.
I mutilate dandelions in the sun,
rattle my rake like a saber
When Michelle-my-neighbor,
over compost, opines
that Aqualung’s a classic
I took three stones from there:
one from the water
one from the sun
and a small one
to grow.
The puzzle of the sun’s longing for
the sea
The marvel: her love fills the sky overflows the rim till the
sea is one
with the sky
For two hours we watched storm clouds gather as our speedboat cut through coffee-colored waves on the Içana River. We beached at the base of a sandy cliff called Paitsidzapani in the Baniwa language, named for a kind of edible frog. Brazilian Portuguese has no word for such herpetological minutiae, so the Baniwa also call the place Serra do Desafio da Vida, or “Challenge of Life Hill.” Baniwa Indians stop here to partake of its dual enchantments: some stay at the base to gather coal shards endowed with a miraculous capacity to promulgate the eponymous (and by all accounts delectable) frogs. The brave, however, look towards the top, fix their eyes on dry twigs lining the precipice, and climb the steep embankment.
On the third morning of our vacation in Barjac, a small Southern French town, a car pulling a trailer bearing a plastic tiger, gorilla, and elephant drove around the square announcing a circus via megaphone. Delighted to see the French tradition of traveling circuses was resisting extinction, I dragged Zoë and Gabriel from the computer and my husband from his French horn. A blue plastic tent was set up in a field below the village. A llama, goat, and minuscule pony with a ground-sweeping mane grazed between the caravans.
The Common is heralded in today’s Inside Higher Ed.
“The last few years had many literary journal editors’ backs against the wall. Numerous journals teetered between shuttering and downsizing.
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Celebrating 15 Years