The happiness of every age is chained in mutual dependence upon that of every other. ― John Quincy Adams John H. Bater arrived in Boston in the 1840s from Devonshire, England. In 1848, he married Sarah Ann B. Williams, originally from Connecticut. Her bloodlines on both sides zigged and zagged…

Streaming classic Frank Sinatra songs, I found myself singing along: “I’ve been a puppet, a pauper, a pirate, a poet / A pawn and a king… .” The stuttering plosives are mischievous fun and they pivot on poet, the one metaphor in the list I take literally as applied to…

1. You’re gaunt as Gauguin’s Yellow Christ, John, and your iconoclasm is so ingrained I see you’re cringing at that comparison. You sure you can’t see it? We could get you a sexy loin cloth, hire the hippie carpenters at Knock on Wood to make a splinter-free white-pine cross. Of…

Motor groaning through a muffler that’s more like a microphone, this village jalopy lurches and rocks, rattling along at a jaunty burro’s pace. Both hands clutching the luggage rack, I sway in the crowded aisle. We standing hover like sulky ghosts above those with seats, the lucky ones complacently oblivious to us. The young man I’m hanging over…

When we first moved in we found cigarette butts everywhere, columns of flaky ash marking where the old lady dropped them, and then forgot, or maybe just couldn’t find. The landlord said she smoked four or five packs a day. …

Like jumping for the first time off the high dive at the pool when she was six, she finally just closed her eyes and hopped, sitting down in the air knees bent one hand trailing loose above her head the other hand pinching her nose. I later recalled with a startled grimace how cruel it seemed that her puffed cheeks held on so fiercely to the last breath.

While fishing in Harry Strunk Lake, Dean McQuiety reeled in a foot and then an arm with hand attached. The detective said and I quote, Murder is no mystery only the motive. The stores in McCook have sold out of handguns, and after church there is talk. Packed away in someone’s freezer are the heads of that missing couple. The devil loves a good mystery. He is sitting up all night in Culbertson, behind a hundred bolted doors, and at a truckstop outside Kearney he is waiting for the next bus, inhaling cigarettes like rations of air.

Spreading a stain of ripe mango The sun dissolves among plum-colored clouds We have come out again to watch And talk quietly or not at all Grateful, taking solace Like a last thought before sleep A dove homes toward the glowing rim Dragging a blue sheet That turns black when no one is looking

I’m tired of keeping my eyes tethered to the same old roads, seeing so much of so little of life through a windshield. I keep spying on my kids in the rearview. …