While we've been hunting down the American Dream, America has been dreaming us. America dreams of itself: of it's land and those who inhabit the land. America is oblivious to the idea of itself as a nation-state. It does not care if the people who live inside of it are real Americans or not, it does not judge us on the merits that we judge ourselves.
America dreams in train whistles, in high school gymnasiums, in deep lakes, and in road side graveyards. America dreams in county fairs and in bus stops; in backyards and bodegas. America dreams in groundhogs and buffalo; in cornstalks and apple orchards.
And it breathes out and rolls over, like Kerouac said, across the great prairies to the mountains that border them and then it stretches out to the ocean beyond. America dreams of people on a shore line, some stepping into the water, some retreating back; the tide of humanity that is shaped by her pull- forever changing, surging out and back.

Felt In Passing

Photographs of my ...

By Jaclyn Sollars

I have a little book of photography for sale. I'd love it if you'd come take a look.

I.

Sometimes I find myself

still in the grips of your

schoolyard poetry;

your voice, grit in my memory.

The feel of your hands,

cool and dry and boney hard,

has stayed on the palms of my

own.

In my head

I've confused you

with the other ones too often

and I'm sorry for that.

You were a different story

altogether, all the time.

II.

Then, there were a thousand

summers in every summer.

There were a thousand words

in your mouth for me.

But how often those words

were about me I cannot say.

On July nights we would

drive from my house to yours;

from your house to mine-

all the fireflies like stars in the wheat.

because that's what makes it beautiful

Originally uploaded by Jaci Sue

I was standing in this little log church that was built in the early 1800s and it was just starting to rain. There was a glassless window there and I leaned out to see how hard it was coming down and I saw this; this perfect light.

There is something in these things that we see every day that holds magic. To name it would be useless. It's been here all this time and hasn't needed a name yet.

There's an angel that nests in the tree of life

There's an angel that nests in the tree of life
Originally uploaded by Jaci Sue

There was a man in Tennessee who lost his wife in mysterious circumstances. He was so struck by her death, so aggrieved, that he (who had never done anything like it before) took up a hammer and a chisel and began to carve her a grave stone.
On the cross is the tree of life and atop the tree is an angel. On the left side of the cross it says "truth" and on the right, "life".
The stone was found unfinished by the tree in which he hung himself.

all of it is proof

all of it is proof
Originally uploaded by Jaci Sue

speak the lost word of heartache
blond sunlight on the river
reflects green water on the leaves

The better left unsaid

Originally uploaded by Jaci Sue

I'm starting to figure out that Ohio is about the things that aren't said, more so than the things that are.
Because the things we think, but don't know for sure are the things that are often the most beautiful and, ultimately, the things that are the most true.

forget everything else

forget everything else
Originally uploaded by Jaci Sue

I think I found something
But is the finding more important
Than the thing itself?
Or is the act of finding necessary
To make the thing itself?

Remember the winter you were eight years old? There was an evening you stood in the field behind your house, right before your mother called you for dinner. You stood there and unzipped your coat because it was warmer than it had been. You stood there and breathed so deeply you thought your lungs would burst. And when your mother called your name a hundred starlings rose up into the twilight.

Why do we need to remember all of this? 

We're recording roadsides like they're lovers we're afraid to loose;

every moment held tight in our hands

to keep them from disappearing,

or maybe to keep us from disappearing;

to keep our hearts in the right place

even if our feet aren't.

...If love is an awkward, scriptless scene

To be played out between two people,

I cannot write it: I am a pattern

Of breath and sleep that city will outlive.

And if poetry is a bond between
Two hearts, it is a bond too frail:
That night words failed, I too, was lost--
To whiskey, memory, a photograph.

East of that city, the green fields
Are winding away beneath your gaze,
And here, west of that city, there is
No water deep enough to let me forget...

-excerpted from the poem Departure by Joe Bolton

Rutherford County, North Carolina;

 Spring, before the kudzo comes

First day of Summer: 2006

Originally uploaded by Jaci Sue

"There is a book inside us, written by the finger of God, through which we may read all things."

-Jean Baptiste van Helmont

Maria Stein, Ohio

Plaster deer with Stations of the Cross.

Shrine of the Holy Relics- Maria Stein, Ohio

And it poured out like springtime-

like breathing in a storm cloud.

In the lost pages of childhood

and here in the twilight of who I used to be

images hold my hand and heart still.

It is a mirror held up and dropped again;

it is the road spooling out behind;

it is a river writen on the palm of my hand;

it has broken my heart

wide open.

The steps outside Cearsars Palace- Las Vegas, NV 

July 2008

(for some reason when I think of Las Vegas I remember everything as being pink.)

the geography of youth

I have studied the geography of  youth; mapped my regret and rapture in the trees and roads of Miami County. I have found causal links in cracked sidewalks; patterns like the lines in my hand, criss-crossed in railroad ties; photographs never taken in fields with lonely trees. The music of what was once said was put on mixtapes and forgotten in a moment; the names unspoken, the faces unremembered.

We were led to believe in the process of memory, in the significance of past tense formation of character, in the finalization of landscape.

I have locked a secret word in my heart, and lost, the key will not be used. I have found the mythical names of remembering and from them constructed others. Born and becoming: I have whispered the word into man, taken my dream of nighttime drives, moved out and into, and fallen back on the promises of youth.

In the past few years I've heard several people lament the loss of the night sky for most of the world's population, and I'm right there with them, lamenting too.  What will perpetual twilight at night do to our dreams; to our selves?

There is a stillness that comes in darkness. The stillness of being small and quiet and anonymous in the night, especially during a night spent in the wilderness; smaller than the universe, just as small as the other animals invisible around you.

But there is stillness to be found in a city even yet, with perpetual twilight looming. There are moments of forgetting one's self even in the sodium glow of streetlights; of being still and small in the universe.