Tim dumps the pebbles and spreads them with a rake. He dreams of the years in college when he visited the public gardens somewhere near Versailles and thought all life could be magic. Forty years later, laying pebbles on another man’s driveway, he knows he was right. That day, he met a girl whose English was as bad as his French. They crunched across the gravel and laughed, and when he came home, he knew landscaping could make a paradise in France or here in Chicago, so he smooths it out and dreams of people who will laugh together here.

John Brantingham

was the first poet laureate of Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks (east of Fresno, CA), and now lives in Jamestown, New York. He is the founder and general editor of The Journal of Radical Wonder, and the author of 21 books of poetry, memoir, and fiction including his latest, Days of Recent Divorce (Arroyo Seco Press, 2023), Life: Orange to Pear (Bamboo Dart Press, 2020), and Kitkitdizzi (Bamboo Dart Press, 2022), the latter a collaboration which features artworks by his wife, Ann Brantingham.

John’s poems, stories, and essays are published in hundreds of magazines and journals. His work has appeared on Garrison Keillor’s daily show, The Writer’s Almanac; has been nominated multiple times for the Pushcart Prize; and was selected for publication in The Best Small Fictions anthology series for 2022 and 2016.

Author’s website: www.johnbrantingham.com/

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ A Walk Among Giants by Kendall Johnson, a review of John and Ann Brantingham’s book Kitkitdizzi: A Non-Linear Memoir of the High Sierra, in MacQueen’s Quinterly (Issue 16, January 2023)

⚡ Finnegan’s (Fiancée Goes McArthur Park on His Birthday) Cake, flash fiction by Brantingham in MacQueen’s Quinterly (Issue 9, August 2021), which was subsequently selected for publication in The Best Small Fictions 2022 anthology

⚡ Objects of Curiosity, a collection of his ekphrastic poems (Sasse Museum of Art, 2020)