J. Michael Dew

Judd and Jane owned two rectangular plots of land that were divided by a drainage ditch.  Because our property couldn't make up its mind about what shape it wanted to be, we kids played on Judd and Jane's land.  They didn't mind so long as we behaved, which we did most of the time. I look out my window now and see the neighborhood kids dashing here and there over my yard and other yards with zero thought about property lines.  An even stretch to throw a ball is an even stretch never mind who technically owns it.  I'm thankful that Judd and Jane knew this, too.

I have a memory of my grampa working out back in the woodshed, cutting kindling for the fire.  There was something about this activity, this moment that grips me in ways that are hard to describe.  So I wrote a poem. Requiem                                     An old man sits in a                                     dark shed on a winter’s eve, and                                     he is surrounded by                                     cord wood packed tight,                                     knots out and up against the aged frame.                                     He is doused in the pale yellow light of                                     a naked bulb, and he is thinking, not                                     about the fixed circular saw before him or                                     the kindling he is making with each                                     screaming pass, but of something else:                                      his alone.  

Once upon a time, I hired a boat captain to take me to an island in the South Pacific so that I could camp there over the weekend.  I was prepared or so I thought.  I had goggles and canned food.  I had my snorkel and disposable camera.  What I didn't have was a can opener that worked or bug spray: the lack of both the cause of my quick undoing.  Soon enough, I took my sunburnt body to the shore, wadded into the clear blue water, and began swimming to the nearest passing boat, thinking all the while that riptides and sharks don't exist. It was the second time I was almost deported from Australia.

The other day, I tried not to stare at the woman with long, scraggily hair streaked thickly with dull iron gray.  She was studying the meat, the chicken, the rows of sausages at the store.  I could see how she calculated the cost, how she looked at the prices and set them next to what was in her dollar store purse.  It was sad.  I finally looked away.  I imagined that she felt she didn't belong on the pretty aisle.