Thursday, October 29, 2020

I lift our child


I lift our child
from the couch where she
has fallen asleep,
my hands warmed
with whiskey,
and carry her over
the smoking threshold
to the bed shrouded
in sea mist
that comes in each night
to relieve the heat
and inscribe with its
taste of salt
my small place
where I hold all the world’s
longing, fear, and care.




Thursday, April 30, 2020

Dark Mountain 17 Available Now



I'm very pleased to announce that Issue 17 of Dark Mountain is available now.

I worked as a prose editor on this issue, as well as contributing a short piece of fiction and an interview with artist and author Obi Kaufmann (The California Field Atlas). You can read my piece, Inauguration Day, here.

May we each find work – real, good, regenerative – to do in these trying times.

My best always,

Neale


Wednesday, April 29, 2020

Manifesto on Deep Adaptation




The children will play games with balls of tanned hide and sticks they carved themselves, on fields mown with a scythe. They will run along cliffs over ocean coves. Their schooling will be listening to acorns to know when they are ready to fall. Their work will be to pry mussels from the rocks, and to roll up plastic turf to reveal the soil beneath.

Our work will be breaking up the stone streets with rusted pick-axes. We will build the rubble into dry-stone shrines, beside the oak and laurel saplings we plant. We will imagine the trees aged to one hundred years and more. We will measure our age by the number of times our hearts have been broken.

Saturday, February 1, 2020

Recent Work



I was very happy to be invited to contribute to the tenth anniversary edition of Dark Mountain, Issue 16: Refuge.

Also, a collaboration between myself and artist Robin V. Robinson can be found in the online edition of Dark Mountain here.

Many thanks for reading.