OLSON, John

Unraveling Some Traveling

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I remember quite fondly all those dirt roads in North Dakota and the hugeness of the sky over the prairie and the endlessness of the horizon, no matter which direction you took, and the smells in summer, sometimes minty, sometimes suede, if a smell can be suede, and not blatant like burlap, like a sack hanging on the wall of a barn, where the odors are unmistakably straw and manure, though not always in combination. Sometimes the straw stood out, sometimes the manure. Things commingle in barns but they don’t go crazy. Not always. Sometimes they do, but that’s a different discussion, from a different era, like an antimacassar on a burgundy couch. Victorian, agrarian, and uncomplaining. Quiet, like the ticking of a cuckoo clock next to the photograph of a deer leaping over a log in a glade, lit from behind, & hung by the gun rack on a wall of pine.

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My Eyebrows Are Selfish

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Things were always fabulously weird and colorful in California when I first got there everyone asked how did you get here where did you come from who are you have we ever met before and no I said that is to say I don’t know what I mean or why I’m here but the companionship it arouses is to be endorsed and treasured and women with black wings and black feathers reflect these drifts of thought as they pile up in a text where spice is a theater and space is a holy volume surrounded by starlight and stone a veritable Eden of surf and redwood and Kim Novak in a big floppy hat riding a chestnut mare.

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