Rich Ives has received grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Artist Trust, Seattle Arts Commission and the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines for his work in poetry, fiction, editing, publishing, translation and photography. His writing has appeared in Verse, North American Review, Dublin Quarterly, Massachusetts Review, Northwest Review, Quarterly West, Iowa Review, Poetry Northwest, Virginia Quarterly Review, Fiction Daily and many more. He is the 2009 winner of the Francis Locke Memorial Poetry Award from Bitter Oleander. In 2011 he received a nomination for The Best of the Web and two nominations for both the Pushcart Prize and The Best of the Net. He is the 2012 winner of the Creative Nonfiction Prize from Thin Air magazine. His book of days, Tunneling to the Moon, is currently being serialized with a work per day appearing for all of 2013 here.---------
Temple Dance
Everything the father needed to know about numbers the mice taught him.
How far away seemed a man and a woman together from the thoughts of the man, even as he swayed to the drumbeat.
Stroke the distant harbor of headaches. That was a long time to think you were human, said the snake.
The wishes all fathers give to the ogre were still fresh.
Stool
The hermit’s head has fallen onto the chest of the sleeping darkness. An execution of his dreaming contained in bottles of air he has placed in his pockets.
The smoke from a dead rat. The hermit puts it in a flask for later.
A shiny wingtip filled with blue water, its laces floating inside as if it were playing with its thoughts.
Cottonwoods, sage, the soft lights inside fir trees climbing the hillside outside the barn.
Rust and tears. The persistent wind, painfully busy murdering a scarf caught along the fence-line for the rest of the traveled night.
In the morning use the barn’s vocal cord as a wind chime.
Sleep past waking. Save the bad dreams for heaven. Milk it.