From the porch, Mitchell watched his daughter Jamie roll her sleeping bag on the lawn. The rest of the gear was already packed in the van: tents, mess kits, tarps. Mitchell had been collecting camping supplies secondhand for years, and he had enough for the nine girls and Bev, the other troop leader, who’d agreed to chaperone the trip.
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Selections: “The Inevitable Snake"
Captain Bob sang night-boatin’ and whistled as he unroped us from the dock a little after ten.
Read MoreFlash Fiction by Sophie Rosenblum
The chickens are bulletproof these days,
Read MoreSelections: “Seed to Full"
After you’ve felled the tree and dragged it from the site and hauled it to the mill, one of the first things you do is scale it, measure to find out how many board-foot it can yield.
Always measure the small end.
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Selections: “Sweet Thang”
I am a sweet thang. That’s what the song on the radio keeps repeating. Sweet thang, sweet thang, sweet thang.
Read MoreSelections: "Morning Beat"
North
Buttery sunshine spreads smooth over juniper dabbed dirt. Blue heron plunges from pine fluff, skims lake green as gunpowder tea. Shores smell of moss, dead carp, of stink-bait. Light exposes an orgy of insects, glints the bustle like an unearthly galaxy of eye-level stars: black butterflies, bluebottle fly wings.
Read MoreSelections: “Polar Plunge"
I’d been noticing the fish girl around Station for weeks. I’d see her in the early morning hours at the lab, dumping coolers of live fish into seawater tanks in the aquarium, or sometimes she’d be tucked away in a corner doing headstands.
Read MoreSelections, "The Seedbank of Mount Sutro"
Mount Sutro, a hill in San Francisco, is difficult to characterize. At 908 feet, it’s a very tall hill that comes close to being a small mountain. (Another 92 feet, and it would have that distinction.) Many hundreds of years ago it might have started life as a hybridized sand dune/chert rock outcropping: it sits to the south of the Great Sand Bank of the outer lands of the city where offshore gusts threw sand from west to east with impunity one hundred years ago.
Read MoreSelections: "Daffodils One Sunday Before Snow"
Already the bulbs croon
the silent damp,
Selections: "Light, Pinned and Singing"
I am finally present. As Virginia said,
My eyes are hard.
Selections: “We Move the Chicken Coop: Chickens Inform the Creative Mind”
According to Howard Gardner’s book Multiple Intelligences, our society prizes logical-mathematical thinking above other kinds. It follows that I did well in school because my talents fall in the linguistic-mathematical range beloved of givers of standardized tests and late twentieth century teachers.
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