This path, this pounded down path, that cuts through the forest and weaves among them like wearing a necklace, lace-mail made of interlinking locks with cathedral cedars as charms and rocky cairns like signposts so you know you are spinning in circles; this path, this hardened-earth foot-weary path curls and turns its way around a lake, a sort of neckline with the head cut off and the fleshy bits scooped out and two mountains – more like mounds – as shoulders that never shrug; it follows down, from either shoulder-mountain, sloping down a v-neck swooping dress of foliage meant to keep us from hiking here, where the path, this winding path down dark and precious places, leads to an encirclement, a campground like a charm at the end of a lovely necklace that hangs on the neck of one that had been led here and suddenly found that this path, this mysterious, double-back, up-and-down-again path led somewhere after all.
Houle writes surrealist and free-form poetry as well as fiction that is at times transgressive in a realist style. His work may be found in Phoenix, Salmon Creek Journal and 52-250:A Year in Flash. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the Salmon Creek Journal. Houle lives in the Pacific Northwest where he is at work on a novel.