For Vedauwoo (a poem) by Birch Malotky
Have you been to the boneyard? The blank eye on the map perched above an asphalt brow there, an…
Wearing our heart on our chalk bags.
Have you been to the boneyard? The blank eye on the map perched above an asphalt brow there, an…
It’s the same story the crow told me It’s the only one he knows Like the morning sun you’ll come…
Milton had overgrowth knots, the greasy kind, matting his beard to his wooly secondhand pullover, which sagged without shape over…
“Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.” Goerte I…
I hold and turn my helmet like a classroom globe, dragging my fingers over each mark, each sign of wear.…
Standing there, gaping at this monstrous and inhuman spectacle of rock and cloud and sky and space, I feel a…
Way back when, which seems like not so long ago, your guidebooks tended to be a few pages of the…
“There’s someone on that off-width you wanted to do.” I pause—midstride—and look up to see someone hanging out halfway…
In the rich caravan of climbers whom we meet at the crags, people come and go. Some, like the flowing…
The teenage Federale slings his machine gun over his shoulder and bends toward my bag. Cocaine? he asks. Marijuana? I…
Doug Tompkins opens the door to a South American summer evening. At seventy-one—stooped and shuffling, a button-down shirt tucked into…
It’s your mom’s minivan pimped out And only seats two Because if it wasn’t hard enough to live in a…
Note: this piece is published in Volume 17, and it is an excerpt from his book, The Desert. Both are…
At some point in my early to midtwenties, I came to the conclusion that life is not about rock climbing.…
Is climbing as innate as sharing, copulating, greed, or even walking? Many evolutionary biologists would offer that the essence of…