Jack B. Bedell

Post-Katrina Ghost Story The private investigator never forgot a set up. She even remembered her parking spots on the cases she worked while she was still in college. That’s why the address she was headed to now bothered her so much. Like a memory where faces and names are blank, but still familiar somehow. Like déjà vu. Even after she eased her van into a great sight line, nothing about the house reminded her of anything.

The Old Heads at Camp —after Joe Wilkins’ “Evening Elegy” I remember the old people marking time at camp, sitting around the table as if it would fly away if they ever stood up, as if the weave of their stories would keep everything where it needed to be, locked in place and secure against time, memory, decay. Every fish brought to the table to clean, every deer carcass, every decision made, or left hanging—the old men connected it all to the past, to whatever happened before we arrived in that moment.