Pamela Porter

  Her loneliness said return, but by then the dam covered the canyon with its dark cloth. Standing on the precipice, she remembered everything: how once, she was a girl who lay on her back in a barn, and the canyon filled with sky, a sea whose fish were named sparrow, swallow,…

  Nearly May and snow holding to the north side of the barn, grass sodden with melt, her boots soaked through to bone. And beside, an open shed tumbling out grey wood, and the drowning-pond’s treacherous ice covering its own darkness below the vista of budded birch and fir, the barn windows spilling their damp…