Michael McLane was born in Salt Lake City, Utah. He holds BAs in both English and Anthropology from the University of Utah, and MFA in Creative Writing from Colorado State University, an MS in Environmental Humanities from the University of Utah, and he is currently a PhD candidate in Creative Writing at the International Institute of Modern Letters at Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand.
McLane is a founding editor of saltfront: studies in human habit(at) and a contributing editor with Sugar House Review. He is the author of the chapbook Trace Elements (Elik Press) and his poems, essays, and reviews have appeared in numerous journals both in the U.S. and internationally, including Colorado Review, Dark Mountain, Interim, Terrain.org, Utah Historical Quarterly, Denver Quarterly, High Country News, Drunken Boat, The Laurel Review, South Dakota Review, and Western Humanities Review. His work has appeared in anthologies such as Shabda Press’ Nuclear Impact, The Helicon West Anthology, and Torrey House Press’ anthologies Breathing Stories and Sights & Sitelines. Excerpts of his Environmental Humanities thesis, Taking The Waters: Beck Street, Baptism, and Thirdspace can be found on mappingslc.org and were adapted by McLane into walking tours of the area for several nearby cultural entities. His work focuses largely on spaces of environmental conflict or degradation, particularly the nuclear history of the western U.S.
From 2012 to 2019, McLane served as the director of the Utah Center for the Book at Utah Humanities and the Utah Humanities Book Festival, the latter of which was the recipient of a Mayor’s Artist Award in 2014. He has served on the boards of numerous literary non-profits in Utah, including the City Art Reading Series, Zion Canyon Mesa, and Writers@Work. He served as the director of the Young Writers@Work conference for two years and also worked as faculty at the Sawtooth Writers Conference for five years.
McLane currently resides in Wellington, New Zealand but will make it home to Salt Lake soon enough, as he always does.
Works
Incise
Incise
All my tattoos are strategically placed around the template
of business casual. But this I cannot hide. I see genuine fear
the first few days. People look away. I have to keep my shirts
buttoned low, chest hair—which has started to gray—climbs
from my collar. I’m a sheepish pimp or stock character of 70s crime
drama. I’m fresh from prison, redemptive. Just start me over.
But it’s tempting to embrace this villainy. I got what I deserved.
Jumped at home, by home, for the unforgivable things said
about home. Or the inverse. The high pressure system.
The pm2.5 of silence.
Settlement
Settlement
The problem with trees is obscurity. You cannot see the future lumbering through the night towards you until it is already on the roof. So we cut them down and distribute them evenly among us so there can be no blame. And we are many and cold, and the trees are legion. One among us has learned to play music on a saw. Low and trembling, it is the song of victory.
Termination Powder
Termination Powder
I. Hanford
We ran from telephone pole to telephone pole. Seeking cover from the basin’s grit. Even the food was like real fine sandpaper. The earth itself was an occupying force, and it was everywhere. We knew one day that there would be nothing left and it would take us with it. Or was it the other way around? And so we quit. Termination powder, we called it. Resignation winds. There’s duty to one’s country and then there is the land itself. One thing we learned was they are not the same.
II. Black Rock Playa
Sand in situ is a punchline. The desert is a migratory bird that hunts. You can watch it spiral up and past you, but the eye cannot perceive its dive. A thin place in time. Outside Gerlach, Nevada, a monument takes shape, built of every car the playa dust has buried from the inside out—stacked high or lined up far beyond the horizon. Contrails. Carnivalesque. But many more make it home, to vacuums and brooms. But the playa is effortless. Leave no trace employs the wrong verb entirely.
III. Rocky Flats
Does a flock of migratory birds have a nucleus? When a mourning bird removes itself from a flock, is there the possibility of chain reaction? How do you measure critical mass in flight? Does the flock become something new? Does the solitary bird? Does the offer of refuge suffice? Are we contained? Inert?
IV. Great Salt Lake
Oolitic sand rims the lake. The feces of brine shrimp rolls and ossifies, wraps itself in minerals and smooths its rough edges. It is irresistibly round or ovoid. We can’t help ourselves. We must move things around. Los Angeles wanted Owens Lake, and so they moved it to Los Angeles. It is better off, as the Owens Valley is windy. It moves things around, but better than we do. It blows and blows and the earth emigrates and we barely even notice the lake bed in our lungs, ancient as it is. So, when a river is needed, it is moved elsewhere. But the lake it fed is not Owens. It has salt and finer things. And when it
blows away, we are rubbed and brined, we are prepared as if edible. And even the shrimp have their curious revenge, their shit raining down for miles in every direction before they too are carried off.
V. San Juan County
Yellow orients to the west, to the San Francisco Peaks. It flows in rivers and flash floods. It never leaves, only hibernates. Yellow roots in the Proto-Indo-European ghel, a start that gives us German yellow, gelb, as well as gold. A root, a seam that glitters, gleams. It attracts and glows, like Fiesta Ware. Though ghel also gives us gall, what we cannot stomach. Google demands yellowcake be more palatable, places a space in my search, tells me yellow cake is 2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour, 2 1/2 teaspoons baking powder, 3/4 teaspoon salt, and 3/4 cup butter, softened to room temperature. Slather in chocolate or red topsoil. Serve as desert or dessert. It is a final course.
Warm Springs
from Warm Springs
what you are in water
vector, macerated
sweet shadow
of former
*
a single boy, a float
a word from the German fleet
implies motion
not dull osmosis
you will never be fleet of foot
but what absorbs
sustains, holds you upright
like the cane, the tapping
that precedes you
*
no one dreams of this place anymore
the city employee tells me
as we toe the ledge
of the largest pool, now empty
the bottom strewn
with abandoned office chairs,
business cards and dead birds.
I don’t believe this is true,
though it feels catatonic, its needs
diverted or denied—
Marco
I say—
That isn’t funny
he says,
but his mouth, his body
betray him
*
and who would want you
striking as you are—
in this perpendicular place
where you can stand on any road
and see exact surveyed salvation
in either direction—
shrunken limb, occasional teetering
soothed on the fault lines, no
fault of your own
in geology, transgress means nothing more
than to envelop, to spread through water,
fumaroles on sea floor making new ground.
*
July 26th, 1847,
the day Thomas Bullock and others
discover the springs, he notes
it was very warm
and smelt very bad
but their shovels made a terrace
of hell, a place for bodies
*
the bathers changing
in the cattails, before
the bathhouse is built
soft sweep
across skin so deafening
they had to separate
the week, days for men,
for women and children
*
we try to tear
ourselves from failing bodies
but what gift stasis,
closed doors
poliomyelitis
let’s call it what it is
a name strangely heroic,
firm, though it is nothing
more than a tithe
one limb left behind—
the other exasperated
with its needs.
*
excuses are easy to come by—
the leg, yes, of course
but you were slow
in your Cold War masculinity
left at home when the men went
fishing, hunting—
rocks were dangerous
and current swift,
on and on,
we must be careful
of company we keep,
but who knew more
of swimming than you
*
the pool is myth,
mothers line the shallow
end of quarantine
a flock of infants float
outstretched
Hellenic young
in their wicker-armed
baskets, the screams
rattle, waver in the fog—
more than anything
you want them to struggle,
to flail, to cast off
what nestles,
black magic activated
by water
and soothed by it
*
my grandmother, who works
in a doctor’s office, who knows
the descent, the turning in on one’s self,
lullaby of the iron lung,
pleads silently for you
to scream, the way forward
diffuse as evaporation, slippery
as condensation on the building’s
buttress windows
*
before the buildings
and the brethren
were the winters,
warm water
Shoshone and Ute
strung along
the frothing range,
mountain’s own body heat
luring game with thermal light
*
we are always at the mercy
of the invisible
what hides in waves,
a trace of so-called saints
red blotch of skin
so much like burns
what can scrub us
so effortlessly away
*
it did take time—
for weeks measles ran
over the foothills,
creating their own tectonics
to match impatient earth
one nearby settler wrote
they would rush past our cabin
howling and screaming – run
and jump into the warm springs
then take cold and die…at all times
of day or night their howls or mournings
rent the air
*
true believers were baptized
twice—once at home
in London or Stockholm, or Missouri,
before the endless accumulation of miles,
and again at the foot of the Wasatch—
called it taking the waters
the price of admission
the slow burn of home in the eyes
on the skin, commitment embodied
in the world endlessly
pouring forth
*
water-borne, confused
tribute or omen, water babies
that haunted springs, that colluded
with the Mormons, ensured
no return, water babies dipped in Zion
upon their arrival, and hurried
back to town,
we are legion, water babies
with shrinking legs and failing nervous
systems, swaddled in the bathhouse,
mothers doing penance
chest-deep in fault
springs eternal
*
the windows above the therapy pools
are blacked out—
from the staircase, I can barely
make out their depth, the drop
into obsolescence—and it is here
in bureaucratic black
that I remember the last time I saw you,
two years before you died,
we were in your hot tub overlooking
the Russian River, the jets humming endlessly
as we drank late into the evening
watching kids pass slow
on inner tubes.
It seemed nothing at the time,
fragile selves, taking what little
they can, what had been kept at bay
for decades in yours, lulled
one more night by the heat
Bibliography
Trace Elements: Mapping the Great Basin and its Peripheries, Elik Press, 2015.
