The dogwoods bloomed in the canyon where there were no trails. I’d go there in the spring with the dog, and we’d be alone except for a bear I named Veronica, who’d run away as soon as she saw us. Once we saw Veronica before she saw us. It was late spring, and the white petals were dropping. She was in a sort of tunnel of arched dogwoods, and my dog sat down and just watched as the bear clawed a fallen trunk, in the kind of meditations black bears get when they are alone, and the earth is quiet.

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

⚡ John Brantingam on the novella-in-flash, poetry, and being Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks’ first poet laureate, an interview in Flash Frontier (July 2023)

⚡ 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)