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Roaming one of your thought neighborhoods, you hear a coin hit a hard floor, listen as it oscillates its way into settling flat. You drift into a vast hall where a shaft of sunlight pings off the silvery coin: you go over, lean, and look. Symbols on it perplex. Now a horse snorts,  and the hall becomes a pasture & the coin becomes a pendant nestled in the cleavage of a woman's brown breasts. "So that belongs to you, then?" you ask. "No, but you do," says she. hans ostrom 2024 ..read more

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At last I attacked a rude section of weeds in the veg garden. I dug, pulled, yanked, ripped, shook, and tossed plants with white ganglia roots. I sweat, took off my jacket,  got chilled, put it back on. A rain squall came. I told myself to stay in the weeding moment. Zen weeder. I couldn't. My mind hopped around like water drops on a hot griddle. But trying to stay in the moment kept me weeding, at least. Half- zenned, half the weeds gone, drenched, I scurried inside.  hans ostrom 2024 ..read more

Great word, not a great boot. Made of rubber, with metal clips, not cloth or leather laces. They kept my feet dry but not warm. In snow, they leaked. What a joy to get them & wet wool socks off, to put dry socks on and heat my feet near the speckled cast iron HOME COMFORT stove, throbbing with oak wood warmth. The wants of a 10-year- old, funneled down to the wish for warmth and a grudge against galoshes. hans ostrom 2024 ..read more

 rustling of a   raven's wings trilling, as a   sparrow sings scratching as a   mouse hides things segments of a   bat's brown wings look at how the   green lichen clings & lust imagines   lavish flings memory hears   faint echoings each day: infinite   happenings hans ostrom 2024 ..read more

An elephant escaped the Point Defiance Zoo and strode the streets of Tacoma briskly, briefly, as if going to work. At a summer party my parents threw, outside in the High Sierra, the ever- silent plumber, Otto, sipped whiskey. He saw a horse come up  to the pasture fence. Otto climbed the fence & leapt on the horse,  which galloped and tossed him off. Otto got up, came back, climbed over, and sipped more whiskey. First time her husband struck her, she loaded the two kids and some luggage  in the Chevrolet and drove away, {No more of that shit,} she said to her friend. Th ..read more

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You collect photos, public records, articles,, obits. Follow DNA maps. Recover family lore. As you work, you float out on a cloud, looking down on all those people you will never know and who will never know you. The mothers and miners, soliders and bankers, caped eccentrics, farm wives who plowed, gay married uncles, preachers. You cannot know them, only scraps left behind, ghostly outlines in chalk. They are your family. They are not your family. You want to build a castle out of names, places, facts. And live there, calling it Family. It is a grand, fascinating illusion, this ancestry ..read more