INTERVIEW

CALVIN MILLS released his surreal debut short story collection The Caged Man just as 2025 came to a close. As author Dustin Reade says, this book is “dark, dreamlike, but never without a deeply human core,” and within these pages, you can find characters whose longings and traumas transform the space around them into something realer than what can be touched. Mills, who lives on the geographically isolated Olympic Peninsula, shows us what it is to be emotionally isolated yet tethered to the places that give one history.

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Jeffrey Howard

An Aging Poet Considers an Alternative Occupation

He glides each morning toward washed-out light 
Sifting through the dormer. Robins splash in a birdbath 
Of carved granite, mere feet from the caged Romas
He received as starts from a former lover.

Through the lane of his mind knifes 
The image, the crack of the gun, the pool’s 
Shattered glass. His body torpedoes 
Like an Arctic puffin. 

To improve his backstroke, he trains 
Brown eyes on the wooden flamingos
In his garden rows. Their wind-crawling wings
A pink dissuasion to magpies and crows.
 
After visiting the farmers’ market in the rain, 
His ancient arms melt beneath sopping 
Sacks of cress, radishes, round sourdough 
Smooth as a river boulder, at the brink 

Of the Olympic-sized puddle moating 
Entry to his front walk. Here in tennis shoes 
He takes his first real lap of the day. His second 
To transpire later in a claw-footed tub.

A turntable buzzes Hendrix’s “Star-Spangled Banner,”
A wrinkled palm nestles within the wet gray of his chest. 
Chlorine and lemon waft off the scoured vanity, 
Harmonize with the notes in his pinot noir.

The cool of the bath buoys his ears like dreams.
He will be born once more, not a Keats but a Phelps,
In bold strokes writing his given name in water 
Before the breeze spins his ashes to the sky.