John Struloeff is the author of the poetry collection, The Man I Was Supposed to Be (Loom Press, 2008). His poems have appeared or are soon forthcoming in The Atlantic Monthly, Prairie Schooner, Zyzzyva, PN Review (UK), The Southern Review, and elsewhere. In 2005, he completed the Ph.D. program in creative writing at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and was a 2005-07 Stegner Fellow […]
They fly down from the mountains in their high-rise trucks with half-mufflers rumbling and rattling, burnt diesel trailing, scenting the air until long after they’ve passed. It is Friday, and shortly after you sit at the bar, numb and sore from flipping sticks at the mill, their trucks will roar into the gravel lot, and […]
The rain was the least of it. Pitch stains on our hands, knuckles bloodied from nicking engine metal, boots muddy— each day, we stopped by to knock on unanswered doors, when love was an animal that had become a carcass, when fathers had steady, gun-ready eyes and mothers were to contain somehow the unending storms—here […]
When he first bought the land, the firs were thick along the road, briars billowing like clouds, stems thick as choker cables. His bulldozer cleared the brush in ten minutes. He rolled them into a viney ball, sprayed it with diesel from the tank in the bed of his truck, swigged the last of his […]
The man I was supposed to be works in a small cedar mill in Oregon. The heel of his left boot is worn smooth by the way the engage lever makes him stand, the shift he has to make, grinding his heel, a slow turn as the log carriage feeds the wood that will shriek […]
The clouds plume and hulk over our field. Wet grasses, combed smooth, arch, carrying the weight of the wind from the forest that rushes the leaves in a great Pacific breath. Electricity cut, I shutter the windows and step onto the porch, lantern unlit. I feel in my bones and blood what’s coming. Beyond the […]
After all those years of watching him walk out the front door in a worn brown coat and stocking cap, into the chilly mist, when he worked on the car at night under a hanging bulb, when he locked himself in his shop where his saw wailed into the forest until midnight, what could explain […]
Twenty years ago my father described a picture he’d taken in Korea, the forests burning, the crackling of gunfire like branches popping in the wind. He did not want to forget the day so many friends had died. But he had forgotten the film, left it to burn in the pocket of his uniform in […]