Fly Casting
Christie Cochrell 

The man who always reminds me of Jimmy Stewart
is out practicing fly casting
on the grassy strip of park along Foothill Expressway,
imagining the shadows he wades in
the icy waters of a trout stream high in the Sierras, or
Perthshire’s Butterstone Loch.


It’s just the same for me, practicing poetry
after I’ve seen him--
sitting on the bed with my laptop, being diverted
by the speckled trout,
adding some heathered crags, and then an osprey near the loch,
a rolling mist, a stone cottage,
and for an early dinner
Scottish salmon with whiskey cream sauce.


Drifting far from where we started, both of us.
The trout rising to the fly.













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About the Author: Christie B. Cochrell loves the play of light, the journeyings of time, things ephemeral and ancient. Her work has been published by Tin House, New Letters, Red Bird Chapbooks and Figroot Press among others, and has won several awards including the Dorothy Cappon Prize for the Essay and the Literal Latté Short Short Contest. Her short story “The Pinecone” received Honorable Mention in the Glimmer Train March/April 2016 Very Short Fiction contest. Once New Mexico Young Poet of the Year, in Santa Fe, she now lives and writes by the ocean in Santa Cruz, California.

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