I wander America on a Harley Davidson motorcycle, sleep on couches and in fifty-dollar motel rooms, eat at Waffle House and Main Street cafes, and have conversations with people whose politics I might not agree with. These are our stories.
Born in 1964
Yesterday’s gentle evening, James and George and I sat on metal chairs beside the creek murmuring alongside the Mineral Springs Motel watching the night come over the mountains and I listened to their stories. James and George are HIV positive. James was diagnosed in...
Laundry Day
Nothing to read, I just thought it was a fun picture…
The Mineral Springs Motel
I spent the night at The Mineral Springs Motel in Webster Springs, West Virginia. That’s a lot of springs for a little coal mining town, I’ll ask Randy about that. Randy owns The Mineral Springs Motel. He’s sixty-nine, former mayor of Webster Springs, former member of...
The Road to Ripley
My cousin Molly lives in suburban Cleveland and has a husband, three kids and cancer. Her parents, my aunt Mary Jane and uncle Phil, live nearby; I stopped for a visit. Phil taught geology at Case Western Reserve and brings real knowledge and understanding to the...
The Four Seasons Motel
Smokey ride across northern Wisconsin yesterday, I guess Canada’s still on fire. Spent the night at the Four Seasons Motel in Crandon, a town of abandoned two-story brick buildings and out-of-business businesses. For dinner, I had a California burger, fries and a root...
Grand Canyons
My worn and dusty shoe dangles Above a billion years Three thousand feet of history Just beneath my soleThe river’s cut is steepBut the fall is not my fearInstead the eons stacked in shades of redCountless to a squintEach the span of all of human historyBut not...
And Snow, Snow was Dead
When I arrived at O’Brien Barracks, I was tired. I hadn’t slept on the plane from JFK to Rhein-Main or on the bus from Rhein-Main to Schwabach, my low-quarters were scuffed and my dress greens were wrinkled and stunk from the travel. There were five of us ‘cruits and...
Lovely Rita
The black vinyl snapped and cracked when I sat on it. The night was cold like that. I fumbled the key into the switch, twisted it and the engine ground around until it'd hacked itself into a roar. Even in the cold, the cab stank like gas and sweat and grease burgers....
Lunchtime Lingerie
Spring semester, 1973, eleventh grade. I was sixteen. First day back after winter break, the principal called me into his office and told me that he was putting me on OJT, no more curriculum, no more math, history or French, no more cutting up frogs. On the Job...
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