the Nixionary

Summer evenings arrive here with a bank of clouds pouring blue-gray over the mountains. When I swim after work, it’s a race between me and those clouds, back and forth-ing with one or two other people in the warm water. Sometimes I have to swing out of the way of kids slapping the surface with [...]

A few things have changed since I got back to Denver three weeks ago. Crow moved out. Gone is the spray-painted address on the white stucco wall at the bottom of the dirt driveway. Gone, the trailer with dusty windows streaked into backwards letters by a messenger finger. Gone, his son who smiled and played [...]

Natalia came over this morning for sticky buns and coffee. It’s my mom’s recipe—pour a stick of butter, a small bag of slivered almonds, a cup of brown sugar, and a teaspoon of cinammon over 20 frozen Rhoades dinner rolls, and leave them out overnight to rise—and we ate them with juicy, perfect sliced peaches [...]

I woke up and walked to the library downtown this morning, and when I arrived, a few things happened. A voice ratcheted off sky-rise walls, high-pitched but low-pitched at the same time, a rumbly screech echoing from somewhere further away than where the voice was actually coming from. I could hear the voice from a [...]

One bummer about Sitka this summer is that the town didn’t have enough money to keep the pool open. When I go to the gym, I look past the dark glass doors and into the hole that once had water and I wish every day that it was full.
I spent the last week in Anchorage, [...]