Writing Down the Bones by Jordan E. Rosenfeld is a thought-provoking look at a government-sponsored war anthology written by veterans of recent wars.

My ex-wife Shasta found the tail of a squirrel underneath the tree in front of her duplex this morning. She wouldn’t last the month and she told me so as she sat on the couch, weeping, her hair in little tufts on her scalp. All I could think of was getting to the airport and having a double for just a dollar more.

We’d slept in the same bed on the night I arrived. I held her like I used to with her head on my chest, my arm cradling her. But it hadn’t felt real. Her back was a xylophone and her breasts, naked against my ribs, deflated wine bladders.

As she slept, her cheeks hollowed and her jaw slackened and revealed a dark, cavernous mouth. Breath, moisture, oxygen, blood, would travel in and out how many more times?

After that first night she’d taken to the couch. We’d been too close.

I left her sitting there crying over the squirrel or its tail or that she is dying and there is nothing we can do about it.

I had to leave. There were things to take care of — a job and a pregnant wife.

I walked out the door, got into the rental and drove to the airport on the cement roads of Central Florida.

Watched Land of the Falling Lakes last night and have added yet another place to my list of places I must visit. Plitvice Lakes National Park is located in Croatia’s Dinaric Mountains and is the oldest National Park in Europe. And if you see this show (or click on the link above and look at some of the photos), you will see that it is stunningly beautiful.

Rise in Grizzly Bear Deaths

To me, this is a big story, an important story, a scary story. If the Grizzly Bear is no longer protected in Yellowstone, then he loses one of his last safe havens. And if he loses one of his last safe havens, we are just that one step closer to wiping grizzlies out on the lower 48. When that happens, we have lost our largest predator and the already tenuous grasp we have on our ecosystems continues to loosen. Soon there will be an even larger population of coyotes and deer and then federal officials will say, “Hey, we should let folks hunt in the National Parks! yeah, why not let ’em zip in there on their atvs and skidoos and just shoot the shit out of the deer and coyotes because there’s too many of ’em and we’ve got a lot of guns!”

Okay, I’m being dramatic. But we need this big predator. He is an important part of the ecosystem. And he is beautiful. If you agree, maybe you can write to your lawmakers and tell them not to drop federal protection for Grizzly Bears.

Allen suggests we have the groups who are for dropping the protected status duke it out with the grizzlies in some sort of gladiator style and I think he might be on to something.

&nbspThere Days in New York City is new fiction from

&nbspRobin Slick. Here is part of the publisher’s blurb:

&nbsp&nbsp&nbspWhat happens when a frustrated American &nbsp&nbspartist-turned-soccer-mom and her &nbsp&nbspoverconfident and charming British cyber-lover &nbsp&nbspplan a three-day tryst of erotic depravity at a &nbsp&nbsphotel in New York City? Elizabeth and Richard are about to find out.

And here’s a bit from Chapter One:

I can’t believe I’m doing this. I’m on the train, wearing exactly what he’s instructed. Tight black button-up blouse. No bra. Short skirt. Thigh high stockings. Heels. No underpants.

Already hooked? Read an excerpt from Chapter One here.

January Thaw

It is warm. Saturday it was in the 50s and yesterday and today the 40s. It’s rainy and the trees are sodden, the earth smells like spring.

But it is not. It is a tease, this thaw. I’d rather have the snow, the cold and get it over with. I don’t want spring in January. I want the ground to crunch beneath my feet and I want to know that spring is in the future.

The water in the barometer rises. Weather is coming.

poem for 1/4/05:

In a Country

by Larry Levis

There is something–some creature–living in my attic. I heard it early this morning when I was lying in bed awake, hoping that I would fall back asleep. It sounded like it was rolling something (an acorn maybe?) back and forth just above my head. It–whatever it was–scurried.

ruled out:

• Bat: Bats have gone wherever it is they go in the winter (where do they go?).
• Chipmunk: Too ballsy for a chipmunk. Plus, I think they head underground for winter.
  

possibilites:

• field mouse: this is what Allen is betting on. We know there is one (or more) in our basement as we have seen the.. ahem… evidence. We also know how it got into our basement (through the rather large hole we had not noticed). Allen thinks this mouse climbs up to the attic through the walls (or at least that’s what he tells me). Honestly, I’m not scared or bothered by mice, per se, BUT I do know that their poop can be dangerous to humans (if ingested or inhaled in some way).
• red squirrel: oh they are wily, those red squirrels. If there is a way, they will find a way. I’m betting on the red squirrel. The scurrying sounded more substantial than mouse scurrying. It sounded like squirrel scurrying. Also, there’s the question of the rolling object–an acorn would be fitting for a red squirrel. Also, there is an oak branch that reaches our roof–a perfect spot for a red squirrel to crawl in through one of the vents. The problem with red squirrels is that they are set on destruction. They love to chew wires and set houses on fire.
• other: I shudder to think what else could be up there. Any ideas?

new at Pindeldyboz: All the Little Voices a wonderful story by Debbie Ann Ice

Poems, Bombs, and the Road to Baghdad By Matthew Doherty is Poetry Magazine‘s December Prose Feature and boy is it well worth a read.

Doherty leads us through his time as a convoy driver in Iraq and his search for the poetry of the moment, for understanding of what is happening and what he is doing there and for his epiphany of what danger means to his work:

But my mind is often free to roam, and one of the subjects of these explorations is poetry—Iraqi poetry; my own; how poetry informs my reading of Iraq, and how Iraq affects my conceptions of what poetry can do.

Sometimes defensive about why he would be doing such a job:

I got here in March. I brought Walden with me. My project here is Thoreauvian, in its way, even though Thoreau, with his well-wrought disgust for war, would probably kill me for saying so. But surely he would concede that it’s an end run around the snares of convention, and that life’s essential facts are rather easily fronted here. Thoreau traveled around the world in his cabin, in books and notebooks and imagination; I took the easy way and got on a plane, and used books to transport me back home or to help illuminate the world that I have put in front of me. There’s work to do here, and it has its demands, its drawbacks. But even Thoreau had to work odd jobs to get the money for his cabin. My truck cost me nothing. Now this is my odd job, and my cabin at the same time.

Doherty is also nothing short of honest in his approach to making his observations into poetry:

But I couldn’t do anything with these things. I could not make anything “well finished” out of them. They were all new. I couldn’t move them from their places. That moonlit water couldn’t be churning behind a ferry; it had to stay where it was (or go where it was going). And a poem about the exact circumstances of the poem’s material would be impossible, or at least boring. Something would have to change in the process, and it seemed to me that to poeticize this actual world would be a reckless thing to do while I’m still here. Poems transform, they control the world in a way, give the poet dominion over everything. I think that part of Rilke’s advice—to love the world’s terrors (if the world has any) because they are our terrors—is the implication that they are ours, poets’ especially, to transform and use. To invoke that privilege now, in this place, is to risk hearing Iraq say, in any of a million ways, “Transform this, motherfucker.”

Ultimately, though, Doherty seeks to justify, perhaps to himself, why he would take such a risk for poetry (or for the money so that he could have more time to write?):

Maybe this is what Rilke was getting at, about works of art springing from danger—that the risks of writing lose some of their power to disable. I hope he’s right, about the decency that experience can generate. And I hope one doesn’t need to go “to the very end of an experience” to get some of it. We don’t go all that far in our trucks. And I’ve gone about as far as I care to go.

found the link to this essay on Arts & Letters Daily

Ten Minutes at Faulkner’s House: Postcard From Oxford, Mississippi is a poignant and funny vignette of writer Joe Woodward’s trip to see the house of an idol.

He and his family arrive too late, they think, to gain entry into the house and after helping one of his kids to pee in the woods, he and his wife strong arm the graduate student in charge of the house into letting them take a quick look around. What he finds is not so much the answer to how Faulkner did what he did, rather he finds a rekindling of his own passion:

There’s been no The Sound and the Fury in my life, yet. But, who knows, lightening may strike even now. To admit to such grand ambition is childlike and out of fashion, like me I suppose. I would write small, perfect, clever books if it was in me, but it is not. My childhood wasn’t simple enough, and so forth. I want to write something crushing and messy, something so bewildering and heavy that the United States Post Office refuses to deliver it. In the meantime, though, as I try muscle through it, please do stop by my house on Santa Clara Avenue. I’ll be there, working—still that graduate student in love, on the phone. I’ll give you your ten minutes for sure.