puppet

NVT: If your head is a stovetop, does that fill your belly with fire to keep the steam blowing off? Or does it fill you with hot air? So easy to be overblown. Or blown over, maybe. But when we do take up space, we run the risk of being called too strident, too grotesque. …

UTOPIAN SLUMPS

NVT: Your favorite dog had a slump for a walk, or maybe a trundle, but it makes me wonder what we see in goofiness that’s so euphoric. We stay with these relatives all up the East Coast who have lives which could be called utopian and we don’t see our utopias. Which is wild privilege, …

ANOTHER HOLLYWOOD DREAM BUBBLE POPPED

NVT: Bubblegum pink is princesses but cheap, and why are dreams always expensive? You want a getaway, but we need it to be high-efficiency, low-emission, and that means money. We wonder where all these bourgeois impulses are coming from -- who birthed you, needs? Need for speed but also comfort. Rest and adversity. We dropped …

despair and disgust

NVT: They always come in twos, and sometimes they have cute matching names. These are the underbelly. Two names that ask you what you’re really feeling. On hour six of driving, pick one. But we’re looking with love. Even on the nights we can’t feel our toes or find a haven to reheat potatoes and …

pudding

NVT: Is there something about packaged foods that gives us comfort over their free-growing counterparts? Of course -- it’s someone taking care of us, telling us what is safe, telling us what is good for consumption. We don’t want someone telling us what to eat, heaven forbid, but give us a grocery store full of …

words without prefix

NVT: When we walked into the open jaws of the earth, I noticed a sheen of clammy sweat building between things -- my shoulders and straps, my fingers and the brochure. Grubby and fingered-through, the way New Orleans feels all over. Even the new feels imminently used. That, and the going. Less the arrivals and …

IT IS PARTY TIME

NVT: In the backyard, we’re seven people and nearly as many animals, at least as many distinctive sounds of laughter, like you could imagine that morning mockingbird above the tent mimicking the hoarse cackle, the feminine shrieky giggle, the deep-bellied baritone, the chest full of a laughter that could only be born from a flood. …

TWELVE PRIESTS

NVT: Driving through Abiquiu in the early morning, still deep frozen from a fitful night of camping, whipping winds deep in our bones, we passed the public library, the boarded-up “Piñon,” up the dusted gravel road into a neighborhood. A cow in the backyard, an electric wheelchair parked in the tall grass behind the fence. …

LACED

NVT: The pattern light makes on a wall through laced curtains -- You said the dappled light made it hard to see the potholes in the road, and it’s true. That golden light laces everything we see with magic, wonder, the safety of our little ship sailing past town on town of low-slung buildings, some …

the grand canyon (april 4, 2019)

NVT: Wanderers with no sea of fog flock to the edge -- where else would America lead? Right up to that edge of speechlessness and the need to declare ourselves; the end of a road so dramatic, we can only envision some ghastly end -- the cowboy in the Western, hooves skidding to a halt …