Roger Fanning

The Space Needle works like a pushpin, just bigger, to put Seattle on the map. On a field trip we all hucked loogies from its observation deck. We learned the Needle—complete with restaurant—went up in 1962, a promise to President Kennedy we woul [...]

Deep end of the pool, a boy does the jellyfish float, watching all the lapswimmers. Their arms carve holes in the H2O; their legs lack up bubbles like a boat propellor. But their faces, even better. . . . There's the retired Captain who's had two [...]

I A kind of resurrection, a real mess, a side of beef heaves by on a hook. It's business as usual at a meatpacking plant: red-floor slime, some human blood. Conveyor belts bear off steaks, fingerparts, all possible succulents, as one. Choppers and bu [...]

In this hospital they itemize the cost of a person's deathbed down to the last aspirin. They charge 25 dollars for fake lamb's wool on which, after surgery, patients bleed. People die with eyes fixed on digital clocks which flip numbers every minute, [...]

There are days I have no family tree. No fairytales, no green riffs to get me through, just a headache from speculation's ingrown halo, a pair of sore feet, and high in bare oak branches a fog that looks white-hot because it's got the sun as hostage. [...]

the terrors, the bloody taciturnity, all the blink-blown, irrevocable severings. . . . —Thomas Lux Iguanas grabble on Galapagos rocks in a National Geographic movie. A teen-age boy naps in the last row of the classroom. He's not popular, a nobo [...]

There are days I have no family tree. No fairytales, no green riffs to get me through, just a headache from speculation's ingrown halo, a pair of sore feet, and high in bare oak branches a fog that looks white-hot because it's got the sun as hostage. [...]