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JOEL LONG, FEATURED IN THE NEW OCEAN STATE REVIEW

Bending Toward the Break

   For Zoë

Deep pandemic days, fans blowing, windows open, temperatures checked, hands clean, my students masked or streaming little squares on my laptop, I taught Keats as I’ve done for years.  I teach every ninth grader in the private school, every student reading this poem pursuing the hope of art and beauty against the weight of loss. Keats, sick with sorrow tells us, “my heart aches” and then tells us why:  the groaning old men, young men growing thin with sickness, Keats’s own brother, and too soon, Keats himself, writ in water.  I told students that stanza three is the doom stanza.  It holds the reasons Keats needs the damn bird to help him fade away, high requiem that sings beyond sorrow, through it, the dull opiate.  I have such sorrow. 

This year, grief keeps piling on.  I could not know if my students understood this as we read, if they understood absolute grief that Keats knew, our need for full-throated song to lift him, lift us; I saw half faces, bridge of the nose, masks protecting us from the virus, sickness that alters our days, their eyes glancing at his poem.  They were reticent, the relative difficulty of gathering breath to push through the filter of the cloth masks and make themselves heard, to force air through sentences to make their points about Bacchus and his pards, the nightingale disappearing over hills, into the next valley, singing the whole way even when we no longer hear it.  

***

The Saturday before, I drove slow on the road to Antelope Island, the dogs, Stanley and Stella in the back of my Subaru.  I stepped out of the car on the causeway to catch the early golden hour, sun still gilded by wildfire haze.  The island looked like a movie of itself, flicker projector, Rothko layers of salt grass, plum-blushing pickleweed on the flats, brazen phragmites.  Seagulls flashed blue, bird-shaped clouds that screamed and dived over the blue sliver of lake. Canada geese thrust their arrows through it all.  Every goose breast was burnished in gold leaf by the patient monk in the scriptorium, just this instant, hallowed, prayer.  Gray-headed avocets in autumn dress collected by dozens over blue sky water shards against the grasses. Flocks of them flew like myriad atoms shimmering, one body pulsing.  The island rose in terraces, ancient shorelines shaved by sharp, quick light.  The golden country moves me, keeps me safe. 

***

This is what I know: I rounded the curve, turned onto the east road of the island, my habit, then captured a digital image of a bison grazing the hillside.  I’ve grown used to bison that live here; they stir me anyway, especially with honey light on their matted fur, rounding their teak eyes in the midst of it, bright beam.  The phone rang in my car: the dash screen lit the name of my former wife, Roxanne.

I pulled over, said hello with a question.  She was sobbing: “I have terrible news.”  This brave woman told me what.  Zoë, her youngest daughter had taken her own life.  No.  Oh God. No.  What do I say when a mother says this out loud?  I had not heard Roxanne’s voice for two years, and now, she said this to me. I asked questions I never wanted to ask, awkward, unseemly questions.  How did she do it?  Where?  What happened?  It is impossible to phrase such questions to the mother of the new dead girl.  Roxanne didn’t know it all. 

She told me she woke a few hours before, three in the morning, the phone buzzing in the kitchen where she charged it.  I see her house in memory; I know where her phone is on the tile counter.  I know where everything is, even in the dark.

She didn’t go to it then, didn’t pick up, tried to sleep, thinking, probably it’s Spam, a wrong number.  But rang again; she got up this time and went to it.  The police dispatch answered, told her a policeman was already standing in her porchlight.  She opened the door, and a uniformed stranger told her they found Zoë.  Roxanne told me what turned out to be a mistake; they found Zoë asphyxiated at the top of Little Cottonwood Canyon.  I didn’t keep her on the phone long, just long enough to tell her that I loved her, that the past didn’t matter, that I was there for her no matter what.  I hoped that she would let me do something, anything for her.  Terror clarifies impurities of the past, all bitterness; only grief is true. 

When we hung up, I convulsed in my car, crying, sobbing, swearing, the morning  shining over the lake, distorted in my eyes.  God damn it, Zoë! Goddamn it!   I hit the dash five times.  The two dogs Stella and Stanley whined a bit, nuzzled the gate from the back of the car, knowing my cry.  The sun rose higher, flattening white across my face.  I saw Zoë in memory, her smile, her perfect nose, her narrow, sparkling eyes, twenty four years old.  I heard her voice, cadence of speech, her laugh that followed.  I imagined what pain could make her drive up the canyon, park, a plan in place, the gravity of it.  

***

Some nights I came to Roxanne in her home, Zoë slept on the couch, wrapped in a fleece blanket, the television on, the orange and white cat, piled on the tattered arm above her.  The television blue light lit half Zoë’s face.  I stepped quietly across the floor, though Zoë’s sleep was deep—she didn’t stir.  Roxanne and I could eat a whole meal in the dining room, Tibetan noodles from Café Shambala down the street, drink a bottle of wine, and Zoë might continue sleeping.  If she woke, she went upstairs for the night, wrapped in that blanket, quiet, the blanket touching every stair. 

When Zoë played volleyball for our high school, I attended every home game, found Roxanne in the wooden bleachers, my principal, my teaching colleagues, parents of my students, students.  I was so proud to settle next to my new wife, knowing that Zoë was there on the gym floor, my stepdaughter, sometimes making the play, the bump, the set, sometimes laying out for a shot on the wood floor—keep the ball in play—sometimes missing, sending the ball out of bounds into the rafters.  She was the fourth of Roxanne’s daughters to play on the team, the last.  We cheered for her.  We stood up in the wooden bleachers of my school and clapped and yelled.    Roxanne told me that she used to see me come to support my students at games like this, to support her daughters, Chloe, Carly, she saw me and wondered about me, before we found each other, this mother of my students, these sisters.  Now, she knew me; we were there together, watching Zoë look over the net as the other team served the ball. 

Sometimes, after school, when Roxanne went to the Bikram yoga studio to teach in the hot room, I’d wait for Zoë in my classroom, grading, picking up papers in stacks, checking emails.  I drove her home.  It felt pleasant, driving my stepdaughter home, a husband’s duty, though I didn’t live with them—I thought I would someday.  This was a stepfather’s task, and I took it on.  Zoë and I talked in the car.  She told me about classes, told me about my teaching peers, what she loved, what made her uncomfortable.  We listened to music I wanted her to love as we drove past Trolley Square, past Hires Root Beer and Hamburgers, up into the Avenues, past the cemetery, down 6th Avenue, where I stopped and dropped her off—see you tomorrow.  Thanks for the ride, and watched Zoë walk past the desert garden, up the steps, open the door to the empty house, two cats waiting.

***

It wasn’t Little Cottonwood but the top of Emigration Canyon.  She parked there, this beauty, this girl who loved her snake, who loved small flowers and bees, spiders she saved and praying mantises, this girl who hugged me hard in the Publik Coffee where she worked a year after the divorce, so glad to see me, wanted to talk about poetry while my internet date stood by, wondering who this barista was.  This girl, this Zoë turned off the ignition—silence then—fumbled with bottles or jars, combined cleaning product with sulfur to make Hydrogen Sulphate, an experiment for a chemistry lab at our school.  She combined elements; then, one, two, three breaths, this girl was dead, Zoë.  What a determined will it required to take those breaths!  She did not want to hurt anyone but herself.  She left a note on the windshield: Call 911. Don’t open the car, the windows.  Don’t break them.  The air is toxic.  Toxic!  She knew if the police found her, opened the car, they would die from the fumes.  They did find her, saw the note, called Hazmat to open the car safely. In ghostly suits, they removed her body.  I imagine the fumes pouring from the open door into the night sky, diffused, harmless in space above her car, the harm already done. 

***

That morning, I made my choice to stay to see what I had come to see, dragging this lodestone by a rough rope around my chest.  Late sunflowers glowed against reed shadows. Magpies combed tails through frost-green Russian olives, the lake in long smears of salt flat, pickleweed, shallow salt water stretched to gleam.  I stopped in the spot where I see porcupines in winter, Jack-in-the-box pheasants all year.  Still sobbing, I got out of the car and rambled the embankment above the springs; I was here to see something beautiful—I needed something beautiful!  Five deer and one fawn scurried over lavender salt flats beyond wide tufts of phragmites, lovely sorrow humming.  The deer a hundred yards away, sensed my presence, spurted in waves across the flats, glanced back.  I am not the one who will hurt you, not now, not ever; they did not hear me, just kept bolting, turning back, running, and then they were hidden with the rest of the hidden.  The salt flats burned blue waves of salt mud, salt brush, water to the fade of the mountains above Syracuse and Layton, dim things, half erased by smoke and daybreak.

***

February of 2013, I met Roxanne at the Art Barn, a gallery at the edge of the university campus.  We were still married. We went to see a show, drawings of Bonnie Susec and Susan Beck, a teacher at my school—she taught Roxanne’s girls, Kiersten, Carly, Chloe, and Zoë.  Together, we walked the gallery, viewed the frenetic collaboration of these artist friends.  This is what I am doing, said one.  This is what I’ve done,  she said to the other.  I thought that night we’d spend  some time together, but after, beneath streetlights in the gallery’s driveway by the tennis court, Roxanne told me that she needed a break from our long-distance, cross-town marriage.  She needed, she said, at least a month, maybe longer; to not see me.  She needed to take care of Zoë.  Zoë was in crisis that I did not  know.  Of course, I was hurt.  I loved Roxanne; I loved Zoë.  I wanted more time with my wife, not less. I didn’t know the crisis my step-daughter faced.  Incredulous, heartbroken, I watched Roxanne walk through Reservoir Park to her car.  Then I turned and slipped through crusty snow and winter smog toward mine. 

Now I understand.  Roxanne always said my daughters are the hill that I am willing to die upon.  She was defending Zoë on that hill.  I suspect now that Zoë was suicidal then, that the crisis was now, bipolarism beginning to show.  I only wanted to be included in that, that I could help in this crisis, stepfather, beloved. Instead, I went home, sensing the end of my marriage with Roxanne.  I was right, but it took longer than that.  I waited weeks just to hear from Roxanne, my own pain and doubt obscuring; I did not know what was happening with Zoë. 

Zoë was my student, then.  I made an effort to treat her like any other student, marking essays and quizzes with greater scrutiny because she was my future stepdaughter, then my stepdaughter.  When I called on her to answer a question of Salinger or Shakespeare, she responded succinctly, insightfully, called me Joel, when every student called me Mr. Long.  When she was struggling during that period of exile, I sometimes sat on the stairs of the auditorium in front of Zoë.  As I walked past her, I always said, hey Zo.  And then faced the stage for announcements, for a musical performance by the choir, the ski team results, debate, basketball.  I felt her presence there and knew what sadness I carried.  I wanted to see her mother.  I wanted to take care of Zoë, knowing her burden. 

***

That Saturday morning, I drove the east road of the island, parked in a lot at the Fielding-Garr ranch house. I rolled down windows for the dogs, and wandered the path past 19th century farm implements— rusted plows, tractors, wagons— and the barn, past historic ranch houses and the century-old root cellar.  I walked to find a grove of poplars and boxelder trees where I would find more birds. 

There, two owls bandied hoots among the leaves.  I had come to see burrowing owls, but great-horned owls would do. I was alert, but now, grief hung an ash storm in my lower ribs, smothering bones that held my eyes.  Another photographer found one owl, camouflaged in the poplar, catching morning orange light among leaves.  The photographer pointed to the owl perched in the papered arm of the tree, head collapsed into the down of its chest, eyes flattened to a squint.  Then, the bird prepared to sound; its head rose from its feathers, beak testing the air.  Its eyes opened, and  the owl hooted, chevrons of feathers expanding its breast as sound rang toward the other, who waited, hooted back, something new, no doubt—every utterance is new, necessary from the core.  Across the stream from fresh springs, mossy green and watercress, up in the trees but hidden came the response from the other owl, the hoot a soft compass point.  I looked and looked into the leaves but could not see the other, and then, silence.  Striations of feathers on the owl’s breast turned iron filings toward a magnet at its center, its heart, pulsing as the owl prepared another rhythmic hoot sent into morning trees to that hidden bird.  And that bird heard, I knew, alive, not the ghost responding but another living bird, vanishing in leaves, bones and fur dropped at the base of the tree, the hunger gone. 

I crossed stones in the gully toward the fence that bars this sanctuary from waves of reeds, salt flats where dozens of bison graze.  We are all searching, and I searched, leaves, tomes a thousand pages long.  I searched until I saw the bird, its eyes closed in the fur of its head.  The other owl hooted, opened its call, and this new owl heard.  The body heard the other body and began welling up, made its response. Music held trees in place, along with pins of warblers and Virginia rails crying, hiding in dark mud of the fresh water spring and green.  This owl opened its eyes, gazed down on me, circles on circles that sank backwards into that owl brain, and I stared back, took a photo to tell the encounter: two animals the middle of the shrinking lake a quarter salt, the wonder of it.  The other owl responded again—I did not say a word.  Zoë was suddenly gone.  I watched the owl as long as I could, listened.  Every bone heard hoots: every bone mixed vision with heartbreak.  Soon, I would call my daughters Hannah and Sarah in Los Angeles and tell them Zoë was gone, imagine what a collision as this would feel in my body if this happened to one of my sweet girls, knowing Roxanne was feeling that heart blow every moment, now and to come.  I drove back over the causeway, dialing numbers preparing my body to say the sentence out loud. 

***

Tuesday, I woke at 3:00 A.M. when blinds in my bedroom rattled; the wind they predicted had come.  I got up and closed the window, went back to sleep.  When I finally woke at 5:30, the wind was fierce.  I heard tall shrubs scratch my living room wall, scribbling in high pitch against windows and aluminum siding.  My habit has been to get out of bed and walk the dogs, but as I stepped out the door, I saw branches down, the wild rose torn from my shrub, draping thorns and swinging rosehips over the driveway, sharp vault, swaying.  I braced against wind, pushing through the small walk, looking for oases, spots between trees where I didn’t expect a branch to break and fall on my head.  In the streets, whole branches skated the asphalt. Leaves pelted me with a sting in wind, gusts of 60, 70 MPH.  I put myself in danger to get these dogs out, to let them relieve themselves in boiling winds.  By the time, I drove to work an hour later, I saw more damage, whole pine trees ripped from the earth, slabs of concrete sidewalk upended above the roots.  And the wind was still blowing, cold clouds in the sky like pulled taffy.  Everywhere I looked, a branch bent toward the break. 

***

In one photo I have of Zoë, we are bowling with both families, my daughters and hers, a ritual Roxanne and I hoped to foster for the holidays.  Chloe leans on Zoë who leans on Kiersten who leans on Roxanne, Carly out of the frame with her current boyfriend.  A circuit here, Chloe’s chin touches Zoë’s shoulder, that contact, electric, momentary, Zoë’s shoulder brimming blood surging from her heart, small thing that Chloe could hold in her hand, the body doing the body’s job. Touch is everything in this image, the sisters’ bodies touching this sister who smiles at their touch and, at this moment, the sound of bowling balls rolling down wooden lanes, hitting gutters, hitting pins that fall calamitously in that rounded white colliding sound on wood, swept away, the sister voices and us. Zoe’s chin nearly touches Kiersten’s shoulder, bones of girls, this woman—everything radiates love and joy, a circuit of it, and everything around is lit.  Roxanne holds her hands in her lap as Kiersten leans into her.  Now, I want Roxanne to reach around her oldest daughter and touch Zoë, feel this girl alive in the bowling alley Christmas break, her sisters beside her, all of them smiling sister love, this family whole.  I let her do it after the fact; there is no fact in sorrow—with the little hope I imagine: I let Roxanne touch the back of Zoë’s head, run her hands down her cool hair, cradle Zoë’s electric dream in her mother’s palm, the daughter alive. 

***

In a text, Roxanne told me she has gone to see Zoë’s body in the worst windstorm ever in Utah, 100 MPH gusts, whole 100-year-old trees ripped from the ground, high desert hurricane.  At Stark Mortuary, smooth jazz comes from speakers hidden in dim décor, the plush carpet, mahogany panels.  She must have asked—she must have said, I am Zoë Walton’s mother; I am here to see her body.  No one should ever utter those words; she had to see her daughter’s body.  I did not know what they had done with Zoë’s body. I only knew that the mortuary would cremate her body after the wake, before the funeral and inurnment.  But this day, Roxanne walked into a room with her daughter’s body.  In a text, she told me, “I went alone. I spent time with her and talked to her, kissed her forehead over and over, and stroked her hair. I touched her lips and ran my fingers down her perfect nose. I ran my hands down her body and held her feet in my hands.”  I will never understand fully what Roxanne felt then, this time out of time with her daughter before her.  I will never understand how she gathered the will finally to get up and turn away from her daughter’s body, open the door and leave.  It must have taken superhuman strength for her just to breathe, just to keep her eyes open, to drive away safely home, streets strewn with branches, powerlines, debris. 

***

A cold air mass settled in the east, and winds descended into the valley, gaining force through the canyons.  In Salt lake City we had .3 inches of rain from July through September, so trees were dry but still had leaves, late summer.  When the winds came, leaves were brutal sails, boats submerged and anchored in dry earth, sails bending the upper branches west, pulling with such force that older trees tore from the roots, lifted sod and sidewalks to follow wind, spruces, maples, sycamores falling on houses, on cars, on powerlines and gardens.  In parks, no houses blocked the winds; iconic trees tumbled, their root systems exposed, their tall ceilings, nerves of roots searching a place to touch the earth closing in underneath. 

In my heart, I see Roxanne walking Mt Olivet cemetery three days after the storm, considering where she might lay the ashes of her daughter among skinny, urban deer that live there, considering where she could put a monument to Zoë’s smile, her corn-silk hair, her body that loved the world but could not bear to stay.  I see the trees in that cemetery, rifted, like Prospero’s stout oaks, the terrible power of wind.  This mother must imagine where she will go in the years left, where she will think of her daughter gone, the daughter who, all her life, she protected, whom she feared for, worried for, wanted nothing but happiness for.  Now this mother must chose the place she will morn.  Every tree ripped from the earth tells what this woman must do as she wanders stones with two dates, names, brief descriptions, stories, one of them soon to say, daughter

***

In the Keats’ ode, he feels weariness of his own life, the fever, the fret, contemplates the ease of death.  He tells us that just to think of this world is to be full of sorrow. Keats knew grief, his parents dying before he came of age, again early in his twenties his beloved brother dying.  I think of Zoë’s sisters, her mother included, the All Girls Club, the closeness of them all, the way they loved each other, four of them, giggling at inside jokes, mimicking voices from South Park in the back seat of any car I rode in with them, leaden-eyed despair.  One is gone, the youngest they all loved, the baby.  It will never be four again, only three, one emptiness inside them, the exact shape and sound of Zoë displacing water of the world.  Now, I am certain I taught that poem to her. 

At the wake, I kept thinking I should be talking to someone else, kept looking up, anticipating; it was her, the fourth sister, the one I could not see, could not embrace, wanting say goodbye to her when it was time to leave, too late.  Keats wanted relief from the ache, found it in the bird, found it, maybe in poetry or art, temporary relief.  He hints at eternity—thou wast not made for death, immortal bird—for Keats, the beauty and relief of that full-throated song flees over the hills. I seek it there, find solace fleeting, in birds—owls, kestrels, meadowlarks—from wild animals—deer, moose, coyote—appearing, then disappearing into the hills and grasses, herons spooked from the wetlands, floating wide blue wings over the ponds, bony legs dipping in cool sapphire the tassels of rushes, these things that keep me in it. 

***

I think of the body of the owl when I cannot find it.  The owl breathes without me, takes air into nine air sacs, lungs that feed oxygen to capillaries, blood that surges through the body of the owl, the brain, shoulders, wings, torso plump with down. I think of hunger and fulfillment, the way hunger makes the bird look, puff up and fly, the arrangement of feathers, primary, secondary, silencing flight so the prey, rabbit, vole, mouse, cannot hear the owl coming down.  I’ve touched detached feathers of an owl, softness at the edges, the calamus’ weightless ivory, the diminishing rachis.  The eyes of the owl can see 110 degrees, 70 degrees of binocular vision, dizzying clarity to every movement in the world before it, every flash of light sent in electric pulse to the brain, pheasant, coyote, snake.  The owl’s hearing is equally acute; it hears with the same clarity, every bulrush shuffle, every gravel scratched.  And the voice, what about the voice? Sometimes I hear the call, the hoot in the dark when the owl’s body is hidden on the island, at the refuge, in my neighborhood trees as I walk the dogs before sunrise, stars still slipping west, fading, that hoot hoot coming from the owl’s throat in some dark pine or birch, the sound a living thing makes from its beak with fierce strength.  Every owl muscle, every tendon and bone works when it must, to explode from the tree and glide over the field, the body, every feather working precisely to bring talons to crush the spine of the weasel at dawn, the hunger that keeps this bird living. 

I think of Zoë’s body before that night, her grin, her elbow, her eyes and arms, her tiny ears, her spine, her bones and tendons, every muscle working to move her arms, to move her voice through her mouth, every nerve, every story the body tells and does not tell, delivered to the grinder, delivered to ash that fills the wooden cylinder on a wave of flowers, Mount Olivet, the place her mother willed herself to choose, lavender roses, plump succulents, her body.  The skinny deer eat everything that she leaves. 

***

Twelve days before, I watched the moon rise with my friends Tim and Camille at their home in Emigration Canyon. Past nine, we settled in, wine in hand, seated on the back patio, six feet apart; the moon emerged above the canyon ridgeline, a sort of fuzz, bramble oak and cedars with a nimbus five miles high.  A few blinks and real light came, waxing gibbous seeping through cedars and oak, every twig and leaf caught in dark shadow as the moon horn pulled stars and planets, pulled Jupiter nearer to Saturn.  The moon rested on the hill to know with light the intricate fringe of bramble oak and ridges, woodblock ink over pocked and streaked dust, the luminous moon.  Outside Tim’s gate, up the paved hill, the road was still for a moment.  Twelve days later, Zoë drove her car up that hill past this home, careful to make every turn, careful to switch the headlights down when cars passed through the canyon, the moon, three days waning past full but risen, ridgelines strobing moonlight above the roof of her car, careful driver, seatbelt on, radio playing God-knows what damned soundtrack. 

***

That morning, after seeing owls at the ranch, I drove the dirt road to the south end of the island hoping to see more birds, hawks, eastern kingbirds, more antelope, bison, deer.  A few stray meadowlarks scattered as my car approached. Past phragmite clumps, bison disappeared, floating in smoky haze on the salt flat, the edge of the island.  The gate was closed a half mile in, so I turned around, my gaze west.  The waning gibbous moon was setting—now I remembered.  It swung along the contour of the island ridge, just gold, freckled stone, and the blue of the sky setting the moon, slowly, gently down on the ridge.  This last moon is the one she let go.  By the time Zoë drove to the top of Emigration Canyon a few hours ago, this moon was two fists above the eastern horizon, frosting scrub oaks and maples, silvering grasses.  Now, Zoë gone, losing light, the moon was beautiful as it grew huge against the ridgeline; it was meaningless.  The moon cannot make sense to the dead, a daughter, stepdaughter, who chose to be dead under this same moon, cut in half with the scruff of hill, now gone.  I drove back to the causeway to take the highway home, thinking who do I tell?  

***

The day of Zoë’s funeral, I taught creative writing at the end of the day. Midway through the 70-minute class, tree grinders started grinding.  The treble pitch of the grind and the engine filled my classroom.  In masks, my students and I stood distanced in separate windows where we could see across the workmen in hard hats and their own COVID masks throwing huge branches into grinders.  The mouth of the grinder spat fragments and chips into the massive bed of a truck.  It had been a week since the wind storm ripped hundred-year trees from the ground, the day these trees I have seen outside every day sixteen years crashed onto the roofs of houses beneath them. 

It was a spectator sport.  The neighbors and homeowners with trees fallen on their houses sat on cement steps of our school to watch the work.  A giant crane lifted the top part of the tree, a perfect, too-early Christmas tree for a house with twenty-foot ceilings, lifted it forty feet in the air; I saw the smoky sky beneath the tree, smoky sky on top—the west still on fire.  The crane swung the tree top high above the street, lowered it, deposited the tree upside-down on the asphalt where it expanded, a spiny, fragrant octopus.  The arborists on the ground dragged chainsaws through the treetop, shaved branches, shoved them into the grinder, accelerating the sound.  They ground the top of the trunk, every ring, every year, dissolved, sprayed chucks of it into the trailer. 

All the air on Lincoln Street smelled of damp pine that day, incense swinging through the sky, drifting toward our mouths on the second floor windows, the classroom where I teach, sap on our tongues.  We guessed what they would do next with the bare trunk still leaning against the roof of the house.  Then, we knew: they lifted it with the crane until the heavy, bare trunk was vertical, twenty feet above the ground. They lay the trunk in the street, began with the chainsaw to work it into manageable chunks.  That tree was gone, a bin full of shavings, golden, damp, a tree-shaped gap in the sky. From the window, I tasted the scent of pine. 

Joel Long grew up in Montana but moved to Utah in 1990. Joel Long’s book Winged Insects won the White Pine Press Poetry Prize. Lessons in Disappearance (2012) and Knowing Time by Light (2010) were published by Blaine Creek Press. His chapbooks, Chopin’s Preludes and Saffron Beneath Every Frost were published from Elik Press.  His poems and essays have appeared in Gettysburg ReviewSports Literate, Prairie SchoonerBellingham ReviewRhinoBitter OleanderMassachusetts ReviewTerrain, and Water-Stone Review, among others He lives in Salt Lake City.