Outside, the Santa Ana Winds blow orange blossoms off the tree. Your metal security door rattles like someone’s trying to get in. It’s one of those days when God seems to be trying to tell you something you’re too dumb to understand; so are the neighbor dogs, who bark and bark.

You step outside to see what the dogs and God want. The angry rattle stops once you open the metal door. The warm wind swirls around you, the dogs calmed to silence when they see you. You think deities and canines might have been saying, “Come outside, won’t you?”

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)