Seascape with Eagle, Driftwood, Ravens, Seagull, Two Men and Their Phones
The ravens look miniature compared to the eagle crouched in the crook of driftwood tree, tearing a seagull to shreds. Think beach bone, skeleton perch. Think rock, tide-worn. The man I watch watches the eagle, ignoring the ravens and the breeze at the back of his neck until he can’t, and pulls his hoodie over...
On Writing as an Act of Living: An Interview with Terry Tempest Williams
Terry Tempest Williams is the author of fourteen books. A naturalist and fierce advocate for freedom of speech, her works include the environmental literature classic Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place, Finding Beauty in a Broken World, and most recently, When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice. Williams is the recipient of the...
The Gatekeeper
The Mountain Climber didn’t like to talk about the accident, but because she alone had witnessed the Skier fall off the top of the world, the press had no one else to turn to. What could she say? Without a word of warning, the Skier had plunged past her through the thin, alpine air and...
Dogs in the Dark
I lie in bed, breath suspended. In the darkness, something is moving. It’s not that I don’t know the source of the noise–it’s that I do. My border collie mix is just making his watchdog rounds, checking each room, working the graveyard shift. His job for fifteen years. Only for the last year Cal’s rhythm...
The Drowning
In July a boy drowns in the lake. * There is a picture window above our kitchen table and through it a view of the lake. At noon, when we sit to eat sandwiches, the water is glassy and green, fracturing only when unseen fish rise and retreat. The sand on the shore is pale. ...
The Moth
At night my father and I sit outside watching moths fly around the bare front door light. Beyond the porch is the warm summer blackness of the mountains. Lights from the infrequent cars on the highway can’t penetrate this envelope of darkness, as if the entire universe were lit by this one dangling bulb. For...
Instincts
I’m with my family on an isolated stretch of the Metolius River in Oregon. Lush vegetation clings to the bank, ferns and clover and elephant grass, willow trees and aspens, but the air hangs hot and dry. Insects burr. A woodpecker taps like a slow metronome. This is before my parents’ divorce, so we’re all...
The Potato Harvest
This is the morning that summer ends. In one hard frost our garden has become an abandoned battlefield, the last vestiges of the living lay stiff and frozen, black wilted zucchini leaves like limp umbrellas stand as pathetic monuments, tattered flags, over what was, only yesterday, a vegetable garden. Potatoes love one heavy frost. It...
Duck, North Carolina
Once, walking, I found on the sand not a butterflied clam but a small tooth. We have been coming here so long that we can point out where the road used to end, though we differ: some say the fish hut, others the rental shack. Pretty soon there will be a baby, eating great fistfuls...
Snail Picking
I was, at age nine, a god of snails. On the quiet San Francisco cul-de-sac where my family lived, Helix aspersa, the brown garden snail, was by far the most plentiful and least evasive wildlife around. Snails plied the long green fins of our neighbor’s agapanthus like barges transiting green canals. I’d unglue them from their...
Hunting the Moon
Buffalo Park trail curves in a figure eight through a meadow below the San Francisco Peaks near Flagstaff, Arizona. In a wet May, spring peepers sing from a little ephemeral wetland. In a generous monsoon summer, Evening Primrose and Sego Lilies lie in the deep grass like fallen stars. In October, grasses have gone gold...
Wordwrack: Openings
Jewelry, tides, language:things that shine.What is description, after all,but encoded desire? Mark Doty A nor’easter smacked into Cape Ann last night, and this morning the wrack’s dark line lies tangled and heaped. Hundreds of shells have settled sideways and tilted on the beach, half in, half out, sand-dribbled, seaweed-draped, partially rinsed. On the outside, they’re...
Dusk, I-270
It was dusk and I’d just crossed over into Missouri when he hurdled in front of my truck, a buck, an eight-pointer. I slammed the brakes and he seemed to freeze–not in the headlights, but in my windshield, his big rheumy eyes staring vacantly into mine. Like two drunks on the dance floor we collided,...
![](https://brevitymag.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/FFU-013-MFA-Digital-Brevity-200x165-181009-Enders-1B.jpeg")