by Matt Briggs

Walking the Dog

I live across the street from a swampy vacant lot. Cottonwoods grow on the lot’s margins, and around the lot there are houses, apartment buildings, highways. There are a lot of people who never see one another.

A bird’s nest, empty most of the time except during the spring migration, clings to the cottonwood closest to my subdivision.

I’m not exactly sure what my stretch of suburbs is called. There is a sign on the arterial, but there is a sign at each of the three intersection of my neighborhood at the arterial and each one says something different. Pinewood, I think mine says. There is an Oakwood, and a Mapleleaf, too, I think. Inside, though, the same three house plans have been built on top of small knolls, in dells, in a steady ranks up the slope of a long hill. Overgrown trees hold ferns in their the crook of their branches and rotting birdhouses Some of the houses sit among clumps of gigantic fir trees. The generation of maples that must have been planted when the construction crews first installed the units have matured and the city is cutting them down, leaving smooth, whitish flat places where there had been trunks.

Flag Ceremony

by Matt Briggs

Sometime after I had been in my Army basic training unit long enough, I knew how to polish my boots until the surface held a thin, buffed glaze richer than the spay-on polish applied by the Drill Sergeants. The aerosol shine left a mucous sheen still shiny even after trail dirt and field dust coated their heels. I knew how to take my time stripping down the excess, black Kiwi wax and then applying a light touch and buffing the leather with my brush. My brush softened after hours of back and forth blows across the boots. I kept both pairs of my boots rotating on my feet unlike most of my more clever bunkmates. They kept one pair highly polished, ready-to-go. The other pair they wore. They could be instantly ready-to-go for inspection. The problem with this was that their polished, inspection ready-to-go pair remained unbroken. Their feet blistered just standing in line during inspection. And if they had to march in those boots, I didn’t want to be around when they peeled back their socks and their skin pulled away from the meat on their heels in white, fluid filled bubbles. I kept both pairs worn and ready and after some time they became more comfortable than tennis shoes. Weeks later after Basic Training when I finally put on the old pair of KEDs I’d worn to Fort Dix, the sneakers with their thin, faded canvas felt light and inconsequential, really. They were hardly on my feet compared to the bulk and weight and authority of my army boots. They felt as though I wore socks. I liked the additional height in the stacked, rubber heels of the army boots. I liked the sound they made on the crumbling cement walkway where we drilled.