| Sean Patrick Hill is a freelance writer, naturalist, and teacher living in Portland, Oregon. He earned his MA in Writing from Portland State University, where he won the Burnham Graduate Award. He received a grant from Regional Arts and Culture Council and residencies from Montana Artists Refuge, Fishtrap, and the Oregon State University Trillium Project. His poems appear or are forthcoming in Exquisite Corpse, elimae, Alba, diode, In Posse Review, RealPoetik, Willow Springs, Unlikely 2.0, and Quarter After Eight. theimaginedfield.blogspot.com , www.seanpatrickhill.typepad.com |
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| Sean Patrick Hill |
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| Down in the Flood My father keeps his own small house with a phone he rarely touches. When I tell him I want to come home he says, What do you think you'll find here after all these years. One summer, out on the mudflats, I unearthed a parking meter the flood dragged twenty miles. No matter how I shook it, its face registered nothing but a thin red flag -- violation. My mother says, Too much like your father. I don't know what you expect. Let me put it this way: I always wondered what else got buried. |
| Call Before You Dig warns the square squat grey-green electrical box, for there are power lines underground. The man walking alone beside the road can hardly believe it. Dressed entirely in brown, he resembles any other clod. The horses in the dead grass, their blonde manes blown in a wind so warm he cannot think what it has to cry about, they are the most beautiful women he's ever seen. He thinks most everything mirrors the same dull tones, the unemployed hay rake, the rusted oil rig trailer, the word Flammable flaking away, yet everything seems so unbelievably satisfied, like retired men fishing. Only he and the osprey are still hungry. And black cattle loose on the road groan in desperation, trying to find themselves a hole in the stiff wire fence. |