"Her paragraphs tell whole truths elegantly--in the shortest space possible--with grace, wite and resonance. As much edge as center, this is a delightful and original books that makes a lot of fiction look redendant and a lot of poetry look anorexic."

Rosellen Brown

                                  DIVINER

She walks at a measured pace, her eyes focused at a point just beyond the fork of the hazel stick which she holds lightly at shoulder level. Veins of clear, potable water tremble under the skin of the earth. She follows to where they converge. Her hands tighten; the waters pull the stick down until her wrists bend backward. "here," she says and says how deep. Lately, she has been called upon with terrible frequency, for it is also true that she can find the severed olimbs of women beside an interstate, wives with bruises on their faces, fathers who have betrayed daughters, videotapers of kidnapped children, wilding boys. At these times her stick abrades her palms, breaks into blossom like Joseph's rod.

                          THE SEVENTH DAY

Up the road from the Town Dump, this side of the ballfield, the sand pit is an arena defined by snow fence sagging in the heat where neighbors made strangers by a long winter drink beer, wait for the annual horse pull to begin. Today there will be no clearing of pine stands, no emptying of field of rock, no hauling of hay. Today, as if in deference to the commandment, paired and harnessed in Sunday leather and brass, they will pull and pull a stone boat to no practical end. Two men will gallop behind them with the hitch. One man will drive them. He will shout like a preacher Back! Back! Back! until they become at a crucial instant one gathered muscle, one heart, one astounding, weightless lunge. And they could pull, on a fulcrum of hoof, the weight of the world.

                     PHYSICS ONE

Each cord of wood that warms this house--ragged hickory, chalky birch, maple, oak rounds that hold a fire overnight, arthritic apple, biscuit wood--has been carried, hauled, cradled, thrown, turned, stacked, handled--from standing timber to ashes for the outhouse--eleven times. Figured this way, the cord weighs forty-four thousand pounds. May those who would split the stom to make their fires first feel the weight, the heat of one cord of wood.

Weasel in the Turkey Pen

Hanging Loose Press

Cover photo/design: Charter Weeks