Tag Archives: fiction

2026, Day Book, Ohio River Valley Literature, Poet's Life, poetry, prose, the no-scape, winter

Daybook 2026 // Winter 1.26.26

Sweater weather

The Monday after Winter Storm Fern. I have no interest in digging out or in finding my way into the world, except as a larger obligation and the realization that I will, at some point, have need. This is not to say I have turned my back on the world; rather, it picks up right where I leave it. That may be the most difficult lesson regarding time: when two friends part, the friendship begins to operate on a sort of half-life: the amount of time required for the friendship to metabolize itself in the absence of fresh interactions, whether in person or at a distance, depends entirely on the amount of toxins sticking to things. I have lost lives to my inability to understand the nature of half-life. Thus, I have learned that I must, at intervals, return to people and things I wish to nurture within myself.

I woke up this morning from dreams that left a trail like footprints disappearing in the snow. Hunkering down is good for my mind, but not necessarily for my body, since the body is meant to move. I will go out later and shovel off the porch and sidewalk, more out of the need to move than out of future necessity. In this instance, the two have a symbiotic relationship. As with all mechanical things, however, a certain amount of resistance must be overcome. I am thinking about the nature of steam and steam pumps. A steam pump operates because the resistance between steam pressure and water pressure is never equal. In order for a steam water pump to push water, the level of steam pressure must exceed the level of water pressure… the pounds per square inch that one pushes against the force of the other. There is a constant working for stasis, for balance, that, if the machinery operates correctly, is never really achieved. Because if the steam psi is balanced perfectly against liquid psi, the pump doesn’t move, energy is not produced, and work is not done. The machinery locks up.

Thus, it could be argued that it is only through resistance that we know we are alive.

These steam engine metaphors will not leave me. But maybe it’s only the broken heart that knows it’s alive.

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2026, Ohio River Valley Literature, Poet's Life, poetry, prose, the no-scape, winter

Daybook 2026 // Winter 1.23.26

Baby Gabriel Garcia Marquez is Watching You. Photo by Mick Parsons

I got distracted in my own library this morning. I wasn’t even looking for anything in particular; I just had one of those gadfly memory moments, in which I was somewhere between putting on deodorant and trying to remember the trail of a dream.

Being back on a more or less regular sleeping schedule, I’ve fallen back into the casual habit of directed dreaming. Sometimes I visit the same places over and over in my dreams, and when there is a place where it feels unfinished, I try to go back. Actual directed dreaming — actively taking control within a dream — takes a lot of practice. Mostly I just try to get back and wander. The trail of the dream doesn’t matter so much as the attempt. I do it for the same reason I’ve casually started working on simple Sudoku puzzles. That reminds me of my grandmother, my mother’s mother. I remember her sitting at the kitchen table, working the word puzzles in the paper. They are both mind-focusing distractions. 

Sometimes all that remains are galley copies and memories. Sometimes less than that. Photo by Mick Parsons.
dream, 
like Borges
of an endless 
library

I moved some books around yesterday. I do this sometimes. And while I was looking again to verify that I was still satisfied with what I’d done, I noticed a few items I hadn’t looked at in a while. I still have two single copies of the first and second issues of a literary journal I spearheaded, Sticky Kitchen. That was back when I tried the small press route, a journey called One-Legged Cow Press. This was more than 20 years ago. Another life. I flipped through, looking at the names. Some of them I still know. A few I haven’t thought about in decades. I remember trying to convince Melissa, my wife then, of the higher cause of the project: the small press, the journal. She was never quite convinced. In the end, she didn’t find me all that convincing. 

the most basic
demonstration
of humanity

Before walking into the kitchen and filling my coffee thermos to come downstairs to the desk (at the merled dog’s insistence), I went back and applied more deodorant. 

Just in case.

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2026, Day Book, Ohio River Valley Literature, poetry, winter

Daybook 2026 // Winter 1.22.26

Early morning, but maybe not too early. Once again, the dog knows where I belong.

Give me my pencil and a space of unused paper, a reheated cup of yesterday evening’s coffee, some music, a simple radio: listening to Muddy Waters on cassette. The sound of callouses strong enough to break glass and make those wound strings bleed a little. This is the lesson. We must practice, so we can make our tools bleed.

Bleed, ye! This is the Thursday Blues.

Try to push out of frame, for a while, the battles collecting themselves at my door, crowded next to the same old Truth. All I want is to write and be left to it, and maybe have a few small comforts. Love. Warmth. Decent coffee. I need to feel like I’ve earned my morning apple. I’d like this to include finding a way to pay bills that doesn’t suck my soul out through my nose. 

If possible, I would prefer the world not be perpetually burning. But that is an institutional obstacle.

Go back to bed, love. 
It just the house, burning.
Do not fret, love. 
Do not fret.
It will only hurt
this very little
very tiny bit.

The cassette plays stretchy and tired, especially on the bridge and guitar solo. There is a particular sound to fingers that find electric pickups amusingly quaint and unnecessary to the singing of the strings. A sound sung by calloused fingers that learned to make heavy brass wound strings cry and sing the blood songs of centuries. The cassette, it still plays, all tired and stretchy, until at some point, it will need a pencil to put it right.

In the winter of America
I am tired of the feedback loop
echoes of dead algorithms
programmed to sound like machines
running lights that themselves lie
and claim to be
long burnt out stars
still shining


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