by Matt Briggs

AT COSTCO, WHILE WAITING FOR MY TIRES TO BE FIXED, I went for a walk along the Green River. I am at the Tukwila CostCo on a road named after the warehouses. I am in the parking lot of an office park of small businesses in warehouses. A stand of cotton-wood trees surrounds a pond that at first, I take to be an oxbow of the Green River, a slough of wet land. I walk along the Green River flowing from the south. The river runs from the slopes of the Cascades south of Black Diamond from the Cedar River Watershed in the jungle of passes where I-90 passes over the central Cascades. The Green River used to be joined by the Mount Rainier glacier fed White River and then the two rivers empties into the Black River at Lake Washington, but things changed the flow. A massive log jam flipped the White River from the channel going north to the west, where it emptied out into Commencement Bay in Tacoma. The lowering of Lake Washington caused the Green River to shift into the Duwamish River channel. The Green River now changes names in Tukwila to the Duwamish. The entire valley floor of the Kent valley feels the echoes of these changes. This is land given over from the cultivation of vegetables to office parks of little warehouses.

by Matt Briggs

I woke on the Sunday before my work week began after a week off during the Fourth of July with a massive shape in my left eye. It appeared like a hole in my field of vision. That is, it appeared like something that wasn’t.

As I stared at it, I could see through it like a slip of cellophane stained with spaghetti grease. The shape obscured an 1/16 of my vision in the lower left-hand side of my left eye. It disappeared as suddenly as it appeared when I wasn’t staring at the wall near my bed. When I closed my eye I could see a halo of this visual disturbance in my inner eye, on my eyelid, or whatever it was that I was looking at when I was looking when my eyes were closed. I vaguely remember seeing this object before I went to bed, but I couldn’t be sure. In any case in the early morning it seemed to have vanished like other objects in my eyes have vanished before. I thought it has some artifact from my reading light like I had stared into the book light without realizing it. I didn’t want to think about it.