Cats

Cats have no long-term interest in their reflections because the images lack any scent for which they can establish a meaningful reference.

Ductwork

I just awakened from one of the strangest dreams ever. I don’t know how I can even try to explain this, but in my dream some of the short stories I have written (here in reality) were made into ductwork for handling air instead of being published in any written form. I kid you not. As the author (?) of the duct, I was allowed to tour the building in which ducts were installed high above.
I stood below my work in awe. Elaborate transitions that switched air flow directions, sweeps, twisting sections, spiral ducts strung off seemingly to infinity. Layers over layers. Perhaps more amazingly, I never questioned that the things I have written might be so handily transformed into something of such utility. As I stood admiring one of the more complex fittings, I underwent an epiphany of some scale, realizing that my writing works much better as ducts than it does as literature.

--Mitchell Hegman

Those Years Gone

Beyond Harlowton, on flat prairie flecked with sage
and ryegrass, the nightsky became so pregnant with stars
it sagged and touched the horizons.
We shivered, stripping our clothes on the weathered stones
humped along the shore of a lake I remember only as deep,
cool, and naked as ourselves.
Wind carried wheatsmell down from Canada.
Stickwillow chattered in dry arroyo.
We dove, swam.
Your last girlfriend had married.
Cityboy.
I watched you tread black water, look up,
wondering how that sky so fat with stars
could lack, so utterly, warmth.
And how that wind followed us to the car.
We were wet, transparent, without hope.
Back at the lake I heard waves piling up against clay banks.
A distant coyote howled out in a language
only the endangered understand.
You understood.

--Mitchell Hegman

If

If you allow every little detail to bug you, every little detail will bug you.

--Mitchell Hegman