Matt Briggs blogs from between Seattle and Tacoma in the Pacific Northwest.
by Matt Briggs
I live across the street from a swampy vacant lot. Cottonwoods grow on the lot’s margins, and around the lot there are houses, apartment buildings, highways. There are a lot of people who never see one another.
A bird’s nest, empty most of the time except during the spring migration, clings to the cottonwood closest to my subdivision.
by Matt Briggs Hhhh
My uncle was obsessed with being alive to the point where he didn’t live at all. He filled a cardboard box with free verse, a landfill with green bottles and a tin urn with his ashes. When I was first aware of him, he was growing things out, weird like Howard Hughes. Uncle Fred decided to grow a whisker under his chin as long as it would grow. It grew and grew like a long fishing line. I asked him if people stepped on his whisker. It was that long.
by Matt Briggs
Sometime after I had been in my Army basic training unit long enough, I knew how to polish my boots until the surface held a thin, buffed glaze richer than the spay-on polish applied by the Drill Sergeants. The aerosol shine left a mucous sheen still shiny even after trail dirt and field dust coated their heels. I knew how to take my time stripping down the excess, black Kiwi wax and then applying a light touch and buffing the leather with my brush. My brush softened after hours of back and forth blows across the boots. I kept both pairs of my boots rotating on my feet unlike most of my more clever bunkmates. They kept one pair highly polished, ready-to-go. The other pair they wore. They could be instantly ready-to-go for inspection. The problem with this was that their polished, inspection ready-to-go pair remained unbroken. Their feet blistered just standing in line during inspection. And if they had to march in those boots, I didn’t want to be around when they peeled back their socks and their skin pulled away from the meat on their heels in white, fluid filled bubbles. I kept both pairs worn and ready and after some time they became more comfortable than tennis shoes. Weeks later after Basic Training when I finally put on the old pair of KEDs I’d worn to Fort Dix, the sneakers with their thin, faded canvas felt light and inconsequential, really. They were hardly on my feet compared to the bulk and weight and authority of my army boots. They felt as though I wore socks. I liked the additional height in the stacked, rubber heels of the army boots. I liked the sound they made on the crumbling cement walkway where we drilled.