Steve Edwards’ memoir, Breaking into the Backcountry, chronicles the seven months he lived in the Oregon wilderness alone in 2001 and is due out in October, 2010. Steve has published poetry and fiction in The Cream City Review, Cutthroat: A Journal of the Arts, Passages North, and Sou’wester. Having just recently become a father, most of his travels right now are back through time–to his own childhood.
Trying to wrap my mind around living on a tropical island for thirteen years and never once seeing the ocean, I stumbled through my Indonesian vocabulary to say, It’s good. It’s big.
A dinosaur dangles over my grandson at the Field Museum near a pink thumb that pops into the prom picture of my granddaughter dressed in strapless red leaving her house in Medina …
The bill in question is actually a 2,000 West African franc note, and it’s the equivalent of about four U.S. dollars. A helpful sum, really, but as I clutch the weathered crinkle in my sweaty palm, its value feels as dirty as the grime that is undoubtedly being transferred to my fingers.
to Egg and Berry brewery, to the pack / of Czechy words I made but didn’t work / in this pink town. I’d readily go back / to your best spots, the unfired gun, that perk //
And if the neap tides of my beauty / sadden him, I cannot help it: / I hang high, the waxy night light …
Three thousand ancestors ask how I straddle / the sea, a foot on either shore. //
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