All These Rooms

NO LESS THAN ME
You should know. Close to sleep the dawn comes.
Through the window, the gray. The light
crawls on all fours. Stops at the carpet.
Squeels and babbles and goes silent. The light
no less alive than me. The sunrise moves
up the wall. Through me.
Makes me light enough
to hear their whispers
like gum on the sidewalk in the […]

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woke up 6 am
said no to work
no to contact lenses
no to coffee
with or without sugar
I just don’t want it
said no to my mother my father
and my uncle
no to the children I have not had yet
and my friend’s children
and “how cute they are when they’re
sick and cranky and need to be held”
said no to giving blow […]

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The Bear Deluxe Magazine Presents:
The Doug Fir Fiction Award
Celebrating place-based and environmental fiction writing
Winner: $1,000 and national publication in The Bear Deluxe Magazine
Finalists (2): $200 and national publication in The Bear Deluxe Magazine
Semifinalists (3-5): Name recognition in The Bear Deluxe Magazine
Contest judge: Katherine Dunn
Katherine Dunn, a Portland-based novelist and journalist, is the author of Geek […]

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You’d think flying would be the sort
of thing you’d never
want to stop, but then sitting here
on the parched porch
where the wood has greyed to splintering
and the pigeon shit
has piled at the base of each supporting beam
as the hours drag themselves along
I notice how rare the bald eagles and the red tailed hawks
(picking through their feathers […]

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I have one hundred years
of sleep in me
one hundred years spent sitting with the moon
at the bottom of a black river
 
while I slept
the moon circled my arms
and showed me that
my emptiness
came from having edges
 
now I imagine myself
as the cold black eyes of the river
passing through bruised shoulders
passing through
a mind made of fire, cement,
and unsent letters
passing […]

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In the streetlight four
porcelain cups on the curb
carefully placed.
Momentarily ruin dares not court
their strict white, the soiled language of concrete,
the way one could not slip a sheet of paper
between the two.
Consider the spring-stunned plumeria,
the florescent bath of nonsense
striping the night from the waste up.
Bare-breasted night, lime-leaf night,
night of a thousand catfish
feeding on the surface of […]

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are like the lighthouse song
effortless the
“I too am here in the night
where many things shine.”

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Do you remember the July we slept
at Kalaloch? One morning,
at dawn, I saw a bald eagle but didn’t wake you.
I needed to be alone with a thing near extinction.
whose life was meaningful by design,
by my own dull recognition of it.
I write by this excuse: to tell you
last night I heard an artist speak about your […]

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GOING OUT IN THE SNOW
5:00 AM. Sunday. The rain dusting the street makes yellow counters and reflected florescent lights coming off the countertop feel almost warm. The trees and stone work buildings emerge in shades.
I used to go to school across the road. All I remember is the one time I lit the wood chips […]

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GOING TO SAY NOTHING
when I call him at midnight. “You know,” I say, “I’ve written a poem where you lose your job.” Nothing. “Then you look out your window and at that moment there is no one more alone.”
“Oh,” he says, “clever. I was just thinking
of calling you.”
When I was sixteen we were driving and […]

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