Michael T. Young

Like these abandoned buildings along the boulevard some good ideas can fall into disrepair: dark in their vacancies, whole sections of wall broken. Year after year weather beats deeper into their exposed beams and we learn to live around their uselessness: take a different bus to work, find another store to get the milk and […]

The first sentence of a certain history is written near an estuary, in a building with no address, behind the last door, at the end of a hall lined with pinewood paneling. One of those panels, when it was a tree, held a robin’s nest, and one of that bird’s young managed to leap from […]

It sounds like grape leaves shaking. It cushions like thick grass underfoot. Its currents spread beyond the range of mountains which is why sometimes people mistake it for the distant trickle of the sun setting. The error depends on which way they’re walking, and if the wind is blowing from the north or south. It […]

Sometimes the blue sky threatens, the lilac conceals some danger. But it passes like a cougar stalking among the boulders and deciding mysteriously to move on.  You don’t know, but something you did or didn’t do, saved your life. And what might have happened had you turned your back on this sunset, this rotting fence […]