Author: Jim Kourlas
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May 2025 Mix
I spent a few days in a tent in Wisconsin receding from life and words, at least my own words. Did a little reading, brought my dumbbells for a couple workouts in the woods, napped, laughed with some friends I hadn’t seen in a minute. Ate prime rib at a supper club, enjoyed a $5.75…
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April 2025 Mix
An ultrasound snapshot, curled slick plastic paper, in the gutter on a sunny Saturday afternoon, dropped or discarded, who knows. Seeds fall in sidewalk cracks and root their meager, eager inch, not knowing how awful a landing they managed to stick. Some seeds carry the next generation. Maybe my greatest feat will be fatherhood. But…
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March 2025 Mix
A strange month, March was, stranded in Oaxaca and then Mexico City for five days by an unforgiving airline (American), missing a second Omaha blizzard. There are worse places to be stranded, especially in March, but we’re little different than our luggage to the airlines, and that’s a bit too dehumanizing to bear after three…
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February 2025 Mix
Every winter, when the Arctic belches a cruel blast over our land, the storm windows in our bathroom frost over. Crazy crystals grow in waving, looping patterns, blocking the view outside. In summer, salesmen come door-to-door offering window replacement, but I’ve seen enough fancy, modern windows with broken seals to know they’re no better at…
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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…
Jim Kourlas 