SEX, ROCKS, AND TAXIDERMY: A CONVERSATION WITH CHRIS OFFUTT
I first met Chris Offutt outside the fabled Foxhead bar on Iowa City’s east side. What I had heard about Chris Offutt was that he graduated from the Workshop during the fabled Conroy days—when Frank Conroy ruled the Workshop with painstaking intensity and tough love—and that he wrote about hunting. I had shot a pigeon with a BB gun at age twelve, from the second-story window of my friend’s brownstone in the Bronx, an experience that continues to plague me with guilt.
...
PANHANDLE
We marry and watch for
the kind of fog
we knew back in tobacco fields.
Put the fish in garlic
and curry while the coconut oils
soak into other vegetables.
Surely there is a cathedral rotting
somewhere in a greener rain,
but no red birds and it’s
the red and steaming feathers
you need for the heart to settle into
its untaught center.
