All posts tagged: Missouri

Dispatch from New Madrid, Missouri

By MADELINE SIMMS

New Madrid, Missouri

I. Mississippi River, Dec. 16, 1811

After midnight, cottonwoods are inconsequential teeth, ripped from the ground by the Mississippi River. An elm snaps like a bird’s neck: an egret. The current betrays every fluttering heart and rages on. A rock becomes sepulcher to the uprooted nest. The river could be less cruel, the winter, more forgiving. Someone could have conceived of this world, but for days, no one but a pair of swans bears witness to the earthquake. The strange earth frees itself into unimaginable fissures. The bank splits and pools into the tall prairie, the way a pail of milk might spill across an oak table. Even water will stain the strongest wood. Supposedly, there is quaking, waking what’s left of the neighbors, small animals that somehow survive. What is survival to the breathless that can’t forget? How long was the egret chick left flinching? There are traces of disruption here: feathers without blood, nests without eggs. Devoid of particular destination, another will roost again.

Dispatch from New Madrid, Missouri
Read more...

Dick Cheney Was Not My Father

By AMY STUBER

Image of snow geese


But he could have been. My father was a similar man. His name was Richard Cheney, though he never went by Dick, and he never lived at the Naval Observatory. He was an orthopedic surgeon in suburban Kansas City who said stupid things like, “These hands are gold,” to people at dinner parties where he was often the one who ate more than his fair share of Shrimp Scampi and dove into the pool drunk in his clothes because he thought everything he did was a fun spectacle.

Dick Cheney Was Not My Father
Read more...

Continental Divide

By JAMES ALAN GILL

We decided we’d stop for the night in Denver while eating at a Taco Johns in North Platte, Nebraska, and scanned the Expedia app on my phone. There was a 4-star hotel in the suburbs northwest of the city on sale for 86 bucks, so I reserved a room because it was the same price as the Best Western.

Continental Divide
Read more...