Michael McGriff was born and raised in Coos Bay, Oregon. He is the author of two poetry collections, Dismantling the Hills(University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008) and Home Burial (Copper Canyon Press, 2012). His other books include a translation ofTomas Tranströmer’s The Sorrow Gondola (Green Integer, 2010) and an edition of David Wevill’s essential works, To Build My Shadow a Fire: […]
Let me be the architect in the glass city of your mouth. The wild clock of your mouth spins backwards: glass to sand, sand to freshwater pearl. Let me be the beekeeper, feather merchant, knife-thrower, soothsayer, the savant of your mouth. The farrier with tested theories of wear and distance, the shoeing of your mouth, […]
I was wrong about oblivion then, summer mornings we walked the logging roads north of Laverne, the gypo trucks leaving miles of gravel dust eddying around us. You were the Queen of Iron and I, the servant Barcelona. The slash-pile we tunneled through […]
That day I burned a heap of tractor tires with ten bucks stuffed in my pocket. What is still most alive are the leaves going silver like fish changing direction on trees whose names I never bothered to learn.
Another Oregon November and I’m barreling down Old Wagon Road again, the night waters of Isthmus Slough winding through the dark. I gear down the three-in-the-tree Chevy as Tonya’s leg pushes against me. She says, Think you’ll leave this place when you’re dead? She’s come to believe we’ll return as the stray dogs at the […]
1. The Scar On My Father’s Chest As a child, the surgeons went in to unkink his heart’s twisted chain. They left a welder’s hasty bead, a moon rotted away to a pink crescent. At 38 he wakes like the tractors. Ready to cut the morning’s throat. 2. Photograph: My Grandfather, His Sons, the Hayfield […]
The World’s Largest Lumber Port, the yellow hulk of Cats winding bayfront chip yards, caroling bargemen looking for pussy, betting on high school football, abandoned Army barracks, Japanese glass floats, cranberry bogs, mooring lines, salmon roe, swing shifts, green chain, millwrights passing each other like black paper cranes from one impermanence to the next, phosphorescent […]