ME Hope travels the state of Oregon in an economy car-cum-kayak; most of the right side of the state is dry but over the mountain, watch out. After two decades of wanderlust, she has settled in Southern Oregon, where she still misses Roma, fresh calamari and any European train station. When not herding cats or teens she wades through the banality and bureaucracy of being a government employee. Recent or upcoming pubs include High Desert Journal, Rattle and the Oregon Literary Review.
I have fallen in love with winter, / with the day that ends at 3:45 in the afternoon. // with the man striding along the path grasping / a pink plastic bag that glows incandescent / although it only contains dish soap / and the cat food he carries home after work …
...you wonder again about the soul, / Where it hides, where it ventures. / There's always one you have to bring to oblivion...
I wanted to be gray-faced / and hated by the Yankees / in the suburbs past Carleton.
Once he’d made the long, impetuous trip, / once we were there, evening air billowing my skirt / over the Pacific, surf sweeping like brushes over drums, / I knew we’d marry.
I lived by a river with tides unresolved / Under the house a sewer under a wooden board it ran / Sometimes a tapping sometimes a hum in the night like a motor
and I dream of a young woman from Prague / standing beside a red motorcycle as if so much / depended upon it...
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