Author: Jim Kourlas
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January 2025 Mix
These are the dog days of winter. No snow this year, just a trace. I peed my pharmaceuticals and used coffee into Boyer Chute the other day, a warm but bleak Sunday. Driving through Ponca Hills to get there is a minor joy, save for the guns in them hills, the meanness, the Catholic cult,…
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December 2024 Mix
I discover America through Columbus, Ohio, my hometown, a town much changed from when I grew up there in the seventies and eighties. The surface lots like dead ponds have been infilled with developer boxes. Buckeye propaganda flies like you’ve stumbled into a strange little fiefdom. We watched football. Em cooked spaghetti and whitefish stew…
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November 2024 Mix
I should probably title these posts more imaginatively. I should probably find a better picture than the one my seven-year-old inked of us tootin’. But it’s marvelous, we’re marvelous, and this is our relationship in all its nuance and glory. In my glorious dream last night, an outfielder leapt off a platform into the sky…
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October 2024 Mix
About five days a week I work out with dumbbells in the backyard. My sister turned me on to an Equinox trainer in NYC named Erika Hearns who began uploading workouts to Instagram during Covid and has kept it up as a side gig ever since. I’ve taken Erika to Greece and Colorado and Columbus…
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September 2024 Mix
Summer hasn’t skedaddled, though the sun’s sliding lower each day and come evening we’re all ready for bed. The drought is back. The loess here is concrete. I planted my usual fall perennials but the water sits on top, reluctant to sink. It lifts to the sky, carries east. I imagine how they’ll grow in…
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August 2024 Mix
Summer in the 1970s was an olive green, two-door Pontiac Monte Carlo. I’d stand on the backseat hump, forearms resting on the bench seating while my mom drove us to Big Bear supermarket or Rink’s with its toy aisle and LP racks. The car’s vinyl was lava in summer and prayers if you happened to…
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July 2024 Mix
I’ve been thinking about safety lately, the cowardice that guides me, or guides us as a species if I want to be fair to myself. Or not even cowardice, but the very nature of our species, eyeing the world for trouble, predators, creditors. At least once a week I have horrific dreams in which I’m…
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June 2024 Mix
We find our sacred spaces. The pic above was taken at the Cuming City Cemetery just north of Blair, Nebraska. Storms rolled through the day before and on that Saturday morning the wind was mussing the grasses on the hill in glorious undulance. The leadplant was in bloom, a subtly mauve takeover in humble bunches…
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May 2024 Mix
We told the boy to clean up his room and he took it to mean organizing all his Guys. He has many, many more than I ever did in 1979. My brother tells me the monkey was named Irving, I think because it was originally his Guy. We didn’t call them Guys back then, just…
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April 2024 Mix
The snapshot above may not look like much, but this is the home my maternal grandmother, the only yiayia I ever knew, grew up in before immigrating to Canada, then the United States, when she was in her twenties. I got to visit the house in Paleopanagia in the plains below the Taygetus Mountains, my…
Jim Kourlas 