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.
We followed her in, a stray, the fattest & first, the temple cat./ In a niche by the altar she crouches, watches them come: the/ mad parade we’d wanted, this troupe of heretics — the ass,/ alpaca, gyrfalcon — unbroken line of celebrants, creatures ...
Mother comes to me as I’m making honey cake, / measuring out sugar then whipping eggs. / Never mind that Mother left this earth / eighteen months earlier...
I miss things: swooping, diving, passionate voices/ in several African tongues, so far beyond me/ they might as well have beamed from the constellations.
Here’s the river I stepped in more than twice.// I can’t see them but I know the boats/ are going by in the sturdy fog...
And now you explore the hidden pockets and come up/ with a City Guide (in English) you picked up in Amsterdam./ Why did I keep that? Where were we going? But she’s/ not there to answer
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