If you count inches as earth and a foot as view, then the '83 shake gifted the world something new: a summit, standing higher, looking out onto the world while the valley sunk below, eight feet beneath the land we'd once known

— inspired by #nwp Write Across America via Idaho Writing Project (Mount Borah)

Eight thousand feet and dropping down, falling ever deeper

The surface world, a distant view; the storied world, ever closer

Eight thousand feet and dropping down, tumbling ever deeper

You catch a glimpse of petroglyphs, seven thousand years or older

Eight thousand feet and dropping down, looking ever deeper

Inside the heart's pulsing beat, and canyon walls, collapse

Eight thousand feet and dropping down, listen ever deeper

Find your feet on solid ground, gaze back up in wonder

Eight thousand feet and dropping down, the poet digging deeper

— inspired by #nwp Write Across America via Idaho Writing Project (Hell's Canyon)

For me rivers are the pulse-pumping backdrop of cameo moments of significance; what I do with them later is up for grabs ... — from The Little Salmon: Confessions at the Edge of the Time Zone by Joy Passanante

It's too easy not to notice how this water from this river runs an ancient course from some distant mountain, its rocky mouth wide open to rejuvenation rains

Here we sit, you and I, writers and poets, dipping toes into time, oblivious to the magic of anything other than this one single moment

— inspired by #nwp Write Across America via Idaho Writing Project https://uploads.knightlab.com/storymapjs/57fdf66a01f874ce56844e55fe4ed895/write-across-idaho/index.html Passanante essay: https://weberstudies.weber.edu/archive/archive%20C%20Vol.%2016.2-18.1/Vol.%2018.0/Passanante.htm

This gathering place (Mahn-a-waukke) This good land (Mino-akking)

This water-bound wheel that draws us by river's hand (Minwaking)

These convergences These currents These confluences

This is where a past tumbles into this present following the future

This place is this place is this place

— inspired by #nwp Write Across America with Milwaukee Writing Project, with name words of place from the Potawatomi and other native tribes

Slabs and pylons and ballast and kerks and joints and oval wing walls and opening these weep holes with shouting words, adding marching feet, towards this structure of justice

— inspired by #nwp Write Across America with Milwaukee Writing Project, and focus on a protest bridge

In places like this, books seem bigger than life, bigger than any page could hold, bigger than any stories, told, larger than the ink they're all dressed up in, yet still an object – solid enough - tangible enough – 'here' enough - to find a hold in the hand they've come to settle in

— inspired by Cincinnati and Hamilton Public Library sculpture via #nwp Write Across America

Whether, or from where, bitter winds may come, this tree knows better than to succumb to temptation, resting eaves and limbs and leaves, grounded in anticipation that that which is rooted, also still rises

inspired by Spring Grove Cemetery via #nwp Write Across America and the Ohio University Writing Project https://uploads.knightlab.com/storymapjs/4359c0f65a9f0840b4295a3f61ad3f9c/story-map-south-west-ohio/index.html

Trains like these

never find their tracks

They empty into darkness;

then travel the way back

inspired by #nwp Write Across America with Ohio Writing Project, Cincinnati https://uploads.knightlab.com/storymapjs/4359c0f65a9f0840b4295a3f61ad3f9c/story-map-south-west-ohio/index.html

They want rain without thunder – Frederick Douglass, 1857

for as surely as one, so, too, the other;

the rumble follows the rains; the rains, follow the rumble

history tumbles into this present hour, how we act today transforms into what becomes tomorrow's stories

the rains follow the rumble; the rumble, following rains

for as surely as one, so, too, the other

inspired by #nwp Write Across America, Pennsylvania Writing and Literature Project https://uploads.knightlab.com/storymapjs/2c6846a0110546e3ccfe7cf8d3d891e0/wcwp-voices-and-views-writing-marathon/index.html

Laurel Mercantile Company

Taste-test the odds and ends of the hometowns of small-town America

Collected and curated, mythologized with nostalgia, at the corner mercantile, placed haphazard into bins:

mailboxes and yard signs, dead candles, garden tools, spools of nicknacks and abandoned soda cans

You can wander the aisles but these aisles never end

inspired by #NWP Write Across America South Mississippi Writing Project