For a time we don't see each other. I spend time at my apartment with Abe. We go out, we meet girls, I go on dates, I drink. I stop writing. I consume myself with the day-to-day, the armor of the unintentionally single man. 

At counseling she deliberately looks good. She… Read full post »

On the back porch of the townhouse the air hangs wet and shallow.  On the glass of gin it condenses into moisture.  The water drips until it forms a concentric circle onto the unfinished wood below.  It is a southern evening.

She wears a loose t-shirt and the shorts the ranger
…

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Perfume Palace sits as a large circle on the edge of a lake and I am in front of it.  Since the invasion has been plugged with large metal tubing to pump in cool air and choked with sandbags in case of rocket fire.  It is a building on life support.

All… Read full post »

Scientists study the effects of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.  They know that there is a limited amount of cortisol we all create.  People at war, people in trauma—they run out of it faster than most.

Cassie is living alone, and I am living with Abe. We go out to… Read full post »

At night I look out of a new window.  It is on the third floor of a walk-up and the tree outside doesn’t have any leaves.  Beyond it are the pink clouds of the night time, made electric by the city lights.  All is silhouette.

I hold up my… Read full post »

In Casco Viejo our apartment borders a hotel that is collapsed and abandoned.  A large hotel has promised to restore it, but our first night the wall collapsed on the street into Plaza de Independencia.

The night we arrive we meet with Matteo, an American ex-pat who had moved… Read full post »

When driving it's the radio that gauges the speed. My phone has died. I have a duffle of clothes and that is it, because this is the inbetween time, from when she has left and when I was in Chicago until Iraq. She is there, and I am… Read full post »

Outside of our place, we burn a book on marriage.  The counselor we are now seeing recommended it, and so we take a stove pot and place it outside and put the book into it and light it on fire while we smoke cigarettes. 

At first the pages do not… Read full post »

It's a regulars bar.  Cheap beer on tap. Cigarette smoke in the air. I sit in the corner and drink whiskey and i've bought a pack and enjoy how the air here is half nicotine. There are hidden places in this city where hidden people go and can still cloud clear… Read full post »

I am a firefly in the night.  The headlights.  The calm glow of the moonlight reflecting off the ripples of an unnamed lake in the cascade mountains, mountains of large black velvet so large they swallow everything, so dark that if I drive hard enough, I know I could disappear forever… Read full post »

John sends a letter.  He explains that I haven’t been to see him in two weeks, and that if I don’t respond within five days of the letter’s postmark I’ll be removed from the program.  The day I open the letter, it is ten days old.

I… Read full post »

Our first place is a Motel 6.  There are two beds, and across the street there is a 7-11.  We buy a bag of chips and a twelve pack of beer, and then think about it more and buy a pack of cigarettes, and then think about it more and pick… Read full post »

I call John.  He tells me there is a group of Vietnam, the Nam, vets who meet every Tuesday.  He invites me to come along.  He says there is free coffee.  He knows I like coffee.  That war was thirty years ago.

They say that PTSD is… Read full post »

          The knick-knack drawers take the longest.  Flea repellent for the dog, change from around the world.  Yen, Won, Pesos, Pounds, Caymanian Dollars. A photo of them in Seaside, Oregon.  They are overlooking the sea.

  &nbs… Read full post »

Before I moved east, I worked a summer harvest in a town called Lewiston, the sort of town built by a halted migration, rusted trailer parks along the rapids of the Snake River inside Hell’s Canyon. 

In the morning, the hands picked us up in the valley and drove… Read full post »

I’m out of what scientists call cortisol.  When you sit in traffic, and you’re frustrated, coritsol is the chemical in your brain that calms you down. 

I ran out of cortisol sometime during the surge in Iraq.  And the cortisol I do have left malfunctions.  It tells… Read full post »

The Veterans Center looks like a converted abortion clinic.  I don't mean that in a poetic way.  It really does.  A hallway with white walls, brown chairs against one side, the plexiglass dividing me from the receptionist. 

The appropriate items define it: an old coffee maker, bu… Read full post »