Old Roads, New Stories: A Literary Series
Maybe this happens to everyone, but I doubt it: Sometimes, every other year or so, a hummingbird comes and joins me while I’m watering the yard. A peripheral swoop. Then hover. Like, What kind of rain is this anyway? Like it’s watching the arcing action of the spray and letting the mist cool its feathers. Then it’s in, gliding back and forth for a while, an invisible-trapeze crisscross through the water. And riding the top of it, surfing. And unconcerned with me…. Most days come with parts that I would trade, that I wish didn’t happen, but this is never one of them. My wish for you this morning?
That a hummingbird will visit—
bright, brief green.
Rob Carney is the author of nine books of poems, including The Book of Drought (Texas Review Press, 2024), winner of the X.J. Kennedy Poetry Prize, and Call and Response (Black Lawrence Press, 2021), and his collection of creative nonfiction, Accidental Gardens: New & Revised, is forthcoming from Wakefield Press. His work has appeared in Cave Wall, The Dark Mountain Project, Sugar House Review, and many other journals, as well as the Norton anthology Flash Fiction Forward (2006). In 2013 he won the Terrain.org Poetry Award and in 2014 he received the Robinson Jeffers/Tor House Prize for Poetry. He is a Professor of English at Utah Valley University and lives in Salt Lake City. Follow his Terrain.org series Old Roads, New Stories.
Read an interview with Rob Carney appearing in Terrain.org: “The Ocean is Full of Questions.”
Read Rob Carney’s Letter to America in Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance, and Democracy, published by Terrain.org and Trinity University Press.
Read poetry by Rob Carney appearing in Terrain.org: 6th Annual Contest Finalist, 4th Annual Contest Winner, and Issue 30. And listen to an interview on Montana Public Radio about The Book of Sharks.
Header photo by Domenic Hoffmann, courtesy Pixabay.
