Selected Works
Atlantic, Iowa
Bird Syntax
Bric-a-Brac
Dear Thano
New Hopes†
Doorbell Press
Contact
Misc.
_________________________________________________________________________________Atlantic, Iowa
published in *82 Review issue 13.3, September 2025
Atlantic is the “Coca-Cola Capital of Iowa.”
I am told this at midnight on a rural train platform in Nebraska where the Amtrak conductor has stopped to stretch his legs. We are a backpacker, a teacher, an old man, a Nebraskan, two Mormons, and a Coca-Cola collector sharing a cigarette. An hour ago we were a backpacker, teacher, old man, Nebraskan, two Mormons, and a Coca-Cola collector listening to a basketball game on the observation-car radio.
The Collector tells us that Atlantic’s annual Coca-Cola Days celebration is the second-largest in the nation, behind Atlanta. He attends every year from Boston. His collection is mostly Coca-Cola lunchboxes.
“Why lunchboxes?”
He doesn’t know.
He tells us the name “Atlantic” was a coin-toss. The town sits halfway between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans and they flipped a coin to decide which name to take. Atlantic won (tails). In fact, he says, Atlantic is actually about three-hundred miles closer to the East Coast than the West.
We nod. The air is cold and the conductor is missing.
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Bird Syntax
published in *82 Review issue 13.3, September 2025
Today man-made matter outweighs all organic matter on Earth.
Today a new species of tanager is discovered in the Andes and named after the sun.
Today a small Bdelloid rotifer is resurrected after 24,000 years in ice.
Today a muon wobbles, sensitive, maybe, to a force not in our best theory. Someone says there must be something contributing to this white space.
*
John James Audubon is thirty-five years old when he starts down the Ohio River in 1820. He carries with him a small portrait of his wife, Lucy, and a piece of paper containing a line the length of her foot, to remind him of the shoe he promises to buy for her when he returns.
*
Outside Peoria a farmer tells me that chickens must “condense” a binocular field of vision by “weaving” and “bobbing” their heads to grant each eye separate access to the world. This is why so many fear them, she says.
*
As I pull a book from the shelf old newspaper-clippings float to the ground.
A SMART BIR
Around the h
finch. Thes
r.
Th
an knows she doesn’t nee
use, but she does nee
devices, which
*
In my dream a stork walks across the lawn to the door and drops a package on the porch, leaning to whisper in my ear. “I really am surprised at you—,” he begins.
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FLORIDA, NOAH’S SON
forthcoming in Florida Anthology, University of Florida Press, 2025
Caution! Wet floor! The Sherwin-Williams logo
is a bucket of paint
pouring over the
world.
The can is on the porch
and Dad is walking the lake,
hands blue.
Just as well
from the kitchen window
And sleep.
I dream of the flood
under an elk head mounted on the wall.
(My hand in water
is a stone)
___________________________________________________________________________