Joshua Heston

I remember the summer’s light dappled through the urban tree canopy of maple and birch and ginkgo, the summer sky a patchy blue over St. Louis, the old doors blue, red, green and white, each stoop, each old 19th century doorway, leading to another home, another series of lives and pasts and memories and futures. A mockingbird perched high up, surveying. A rabbit bounded into an overgrown lot where others’ memories once stood, now a jungle of castor bean plants and invasive Chinese tree of...

Far down the road, the Ozark Mountains rise in hills and hollers deep. But here along the river the rocks are harder to see, rare highway rock cuts made back in the old days when highway roads were new and government work crews recently enlisted.

The full wolf moon rises slowly in the early evening’s eastern sky. Last light of day and the Ozarks are shades of rust and umber, red and lemon yellow, the sky that pale creamy blue of early winter. Too daylight yet for stars. Only the moon can be seen, also pale and creamy and massive, as it tugs on the tides and calls to the coyotes in the fields out beyond the high school. In the rise of the full moon, there is yet a sense of rotation, of our movement in the celestial seas.   The windows...