Door

Before walking down the steps she turned to close the screen door outside the house. He turned the doorknob of the thick oak door on the inside of the house and pushed it closed. There was pressure between the two forces, as if the house was resisting its sealing. After a brief fight the oak prevailed. Its heaviness was too much for the thin metal and weak mesh of the screen door. All night the wind brushed up against the losing side, perhaps trying to help it close. The sound was a faint knocking, keeping him up, making him wonder how he ever let her go.

Sky

The setting sun tinged the sky with ripped blister red, the day's skin peeled back and left raw against the scratch of the hawk claw and rub of the wind. 

Exhausted

Stale taste of fatigue in the mouth. Words wheezed out in asthma gasps, sparse and struggling to say much of anything at all. Sedate tongue lying limp. Stagnant saliva, a murky film. The hard rub of teeth against teeth. Kiss into me your lusty flavor, and lick away the grime.

Prairies 2

Snow, tall against the shoulder of the highway. The secret of the prairies gathering strength behind the cold blockade. Will anyone stop and climb the ridge, if only to stare at the sweep of unmarked land and wonder why they cannot cross it? Soon the walls will melt. Water will flood the road and the grass will puncture into view. And we'll drive past, able to see again, still feeling unwelcome, and struggling to define why.

Beach

He lay on the sand, his eyes closed and focused on the clutter of questions crawling forward from the back of his mind. When the movement became cramped, his sight unfurled to rest on the sky, today a placid blue, yesterday grey and storm wrought, though no less easeful. And he begged for the day when he could live within the eddy of his thoughts without struggle.

Spring

My dad told me that when he was a kid, every spring after the snow had melted he'd walk through the field of his elementary school and scour the grass for coins dropped in the winter by weak, shivering hands. Each time I come up my driveway I look to the right at our lawn. Snowbanks piled four feet high, the square space of the lawn untouched for months. Come the thaw there will be no wealth revealed under the vault of snow in front of our house. Nothing will have changed. The drowned grass will gasp back to living and the water will dirty the streets. And while no bronze or silver will glint in the sun, there remains the treasure of seeing something so familiar, after having been hidden for so long.

Prairies

I've driven through the Canadian prairies for years. I'm familiar with the sand coloured fields of wheat, the yellow of rapeseed, the abandoned shells of barns and houses speckled across the hardened sea. I've always wanted to walk into one of the wrecks. It's as if sunken ships have come to rest somewhere that they can be found. Something keeps me from stopping the car and stepping out into the intimate unknown of the land. A privacy felt in its humbling quiet. A respect for it's generosity in letting us see the sky stretched out like nothing else could be. So for now I drive on past, a curious observer of empty spaces hoping one day to walk across the divide into this great possibility and that I'll know where to go, and what to do.