Hike You!: The Bicycle That Came Out of the River

Some objects become symbols because somebody deliberately makes them symbols. Others just show up.

This bicycle came out of the Rock River.

By the time Ryan Davis photographed it, it was standing in front of the old Rockford Register Star building, looking less like a bicycle somebody might ride than something the river had made. Mud coated the frame. Rust had gotten into it. Whatever ordinary life it had once possessed was over. Someone had pulled it from the water and propped it upright, and there it stood: wrecked, filthy, strangely dignified.

We kept seeing things like this because we kept walking.

That is where Hike You! came from. Ryan and I spent years walking Rockford together, often covering the same streets and paths again and again. The exhibition is about what happened when repetition stopped making those places more familiar and instead made them increasingly strange: two people taking “the same steps in the same town” until ordinary Rockford became “new and mysterious... and magical.”

It wasn't conceived as a documentary project. We weren't compiling an inventory of Rockford landmarks or trying to photograph the city's most photogenic places. We walked. Ryan carried a camera. I carried whatever it is a poet carries around in his head. Things presented themselves.

A rock. A discarded vacuum cleaner. An old theater marquee. Something dragged from the bottom of the river. The eventual subjects of Hike You! could be beautiful, ridiculous, damaged, historic, nearly invisible or all of those things at once. Even magnet fishing at Fordham Dam became part of the vocabulary of the project: “dragging rock bottom / we reel in rusty remnants / of the Screw City.”

The bicycle was different.

By then, both Ryan and I were in motion ourselves.

We had previous lives behind us. Versions of ourselves, expectations, habits, destinations. Neither of us was simply walking around Rockford for exercise. Without necessarily announcing it to ourselves at the time, we were walking into new lives. The walks became part of that transition. So did the photographs. So did the poems.

And there, outside the Register Star, was this bicycle that had literally been pulled up from beneath the surface of the city.

It had been somewhere else.

Now it was here.

That was hard to miss.

The haiku that emerged from the photograph was:

a little mud in my
gears won't make me forget my
heart is the motor

I like that the poem doesn't pretend the mud isn't there.

There is mud in the gears. Of course there is.

Transformation is frequently described as though the old life simply falls away and the new one begins cleanly. That wasn't what this bicycle suggested to me, and it wasn't what our lives looked like. You bring things with you. Some damage remains. The gears grind. The frame shows where it has been.

But the heart is still the motor.

The bicycle became one of the pieces that most clearly expressed something I gradually understood about the larger Hike You! project. We thought we were repeatedly walking through Rockford, but Rockford was also providing us with a language for understanding what was happening to us.

The city was full of metaphors we hadn't asked for.

That mattered particularly in this location. Behind the bicycle stands the former Rockford Register Star building, itself a monument to a Rockford that was already changing. In front of it is an object recovered from the Rock River. And somewhere between the old newspaper building, the river mud, the rusted bicycle, Ryan's photograph and my seventeen syllables were two people trying to figure out what came next.

There was no reason to know, when we started walking, that any of this would become an exhibition.

That is one of the things I love most about Hike You!

It emerged.

A walk became another walk. A photograph became a poem. Familiar streets became unfamiliar. Things we'd passed dozens of times suddenly demanded attention. Eventually we had accumulated evidence of something neither of us had quite intended to make.

The project's subjects can appear almost comically insignificant. That's part of its philosophy. The Times Theatre doesn't need a magnificent restored marquee to become worthy of attention; its modest one can resemble “the proud grin of a third child / missing their first tooth.” A dirty bicycle doesn't have to be repaired, polished and returned to the road before it can tell you something about continuing.

Sometimes you get dragged out of the river covered in mud.

Sometimes somebody stands you back up.

And sometimes that is enough to begin again.

Hike You!
Thomas L. Vaultonburg + Ryan Davis
Fall ArtScene 2026 — Rockford, Illinois

 

Small Songs for Weary Travelers: Finding a Larger World by Making Life Smaller

There is a sentence near the beginning of Small Songs for Weary Travelers that explains almost everything that follows:

“In late 2019 I went from having a very large life to having a very small life.”

 

Thomas L. Vaultonburg's Small Songs for Weary Travelers, published in 2023, is a book of haiku, but it is also the record of what happened after that sentence became true.

The introduction describes a period of contraction. Whatever plans existed for returning to a larger world were interrupted when, only a few months later, the world itself contracted. The pandemic closed doors that were already closing. Vaultonburg's response was counterintuitive: instead of fighting immediately to make his life larger again, he deliberately made his field of attention smaller.

“So I did the only thing that made sense in a world that had suddenly gotten small,” he writes. “I went even smaller.”

That decision is the beginning of Small Songs for Weary Travelers.

Vaultonburg studied Buddhism and Zen, although he describes the process less as conversion than assimilation: Zen simply became his “default setting.” On January 1, 2020, he began writing only haiku. The restriction produced an unexpected freedom. If the body could not travel freely through the world, attention still could. Words could. Imagination could.

And then something else happened. He reconnected with one of his oldest friends, Tré, and the two began a creative collaboration. The world eventually reopened, but by then Vaultonburg discovered that he no longer particularly wanted the old large world back. He preferred this one: a smaller world populated by Bashō, Issa, Buson, a creative partner, animals, trees, rivers, moonlight, tea, and whatever happened to wander across the trail that morning.

That history matters because otherwise Small Songs can be mistaken for a collection of individually clever nature poems. It is much more coherent than that.

It is a book about learning to inhabit what remains.

The World Hasn't Gone Anywhere

Nature in these poems is rarely scenery. The animals and plants are doing things entirely independent of the poet, and quite often they seem considerably wiser than he is.

One of the funniest examples occurs during the apocalypse:

the world is ending
and yet my aloe blooms have
heard nothing of this

The joke is excellent, but the idea underneath it is central to the collection. Human catastrophe is not necessarily universal catastrophe. We announce the end of the world when what we frequently mean is the end of our arrangement with the world. Meanwhile, aloe blooms.

The trees aren't particularly impressed with us either. In “origin,” human beings go looking for their roots while the trees, which actually have roots, politely suppress their amusement.

Again and again, the nonhuman world quietly corrects human self-importance.

A stone can remain silent for aeons and reveal itself when placed against a breast. A stream patiently transforms an arrowhead into a pebble that can become a baby's rattle. Wind rearranging fallen leaves turns out to be an architect.

These aren't poems about conquering nature, deciphering nature, or even escaping into nature.

They are poems about getting over yourself sufficiently to notice it.

That distinction is important.

Zen With Mosquitoes

There is Buddhism throughout Small Songs for Weary Travelers, but mercifully little interest in behaving like a holy man.

Vaultonburg's Zen contains mosquitoes, tacos, dung beetles, gift shops and occasional profanity.

In “Gift Shop,” a master's book about austerity sells briskly in the zendo gift shop. In “rooftop,” Buddhas ride bicycles while other Buddhas eat tacos. An octopus writes perhaps the most concise spiritual instruction in the entire collection with her ink: “stay the fuck away.”

And “reductio ad zendo” reduces spiritual instruction until almost nothing remains:

there is nothing you need to do
there is nothing you need
there is nothing

The humor isn't decoration pasted onto the philosophy. It is part of the philosophy.

A writer can make Zen unbearably solemn very quickly. Vaultonburg seems constitutionally incapable of allowing that to happen. Every time enlightenment threatens to become grandiose, a possum gets into the garbage.

That may be one of the book's greatest strengths.

The poems aren't asking the reader to transcend ordinary existence. They continually push the reader back into it.

The Bestiary

There are enough animals in Small Songs to populate a peculiar ark: wolves, bears, crows, coyotes, foxes, possums, rabbits, trout, catfish, ocelots, beetles, dragonflies, cicadas, hummingbirds, mosquitoes, skunks, hawks and numerous others.

But they aren't symbols in the conventional poetic sense.

Coyote is Coyote.

Possum is Possum.

The mosquito wants blood.

The trout eats the mayfly.

The poet doesn't demand that nature conform to human morality before he agrees to love it.

One of the most revealing poems in the book may be “nothing personal”:

but i love you said
hare to wolf, AND i love you
too said wolf to hare

That is funny until you think about it.

Love does not eliminate appetite. Affection doesn't cancel mortality. The wolf remains a wolf and the hare remains lunch. Small Songs repeatedly refuses the sentimental version of nature in which everything exists to reassure the human observer.

The book's natural world is beautiful precisely because it doesn't need us.

And Yet This Is a Love Book

For all the animals, Zen jokes and wandering, another presence gradually becomes impossible to miss.

There is a “you.”

And that “you” changes the scale of the book.

Early in the collection, “abundance” offers a wonderfully modest inventory:

leaves for my water,
a pen, your smile.

Later, an entire philosophy of sufficient existence emerges in “juniper”:

i can live in a
world as small as you and i
and that juniper

That may be the emotional center of Small Songs for Weary Travelers.

The small world introduced at the beginning of the book is no longer a deprivation.

It has become enough.

This is where the book's title begins to acquire its full meaning. The traveler isn't necessarily somebody crossing continents. Travel can mean surviving time. Moving through grief. Entering another season. Walking beside someone. Becoming someone slightly different from the person who began the journey.

And companionship does not end the journey. It changes what traveling means.

“If I die on the road with you,” one poem says, “I do not die / I become the road.”

That is a remarkably large idea for seventeen or so syllables.

The Screw City Is Still in There

For all its forests, rivers and spiritual wandering, this is also unmistakably the work of a Midwestern poet.

Corn appears. So does the Rock River. So does Blackhawk. So does the Screw City itself.

In “Magnet Fishing At the Fordham Dam,” dedicated to Ryan Davis, the poet drags the river bottom and pulls up “rusty remnants / of the Screw City.”

Elsewhere, the landscape becomes “miles of corn and hogs' / blood down the slaughterhouse / drain.”

This isn't imported Japanese scenery dressed up as Midwestern haiku. Vaultonburg borrows a poetic tradition but writes from where his feet actually are.

That is one reason the book works.

Bashō's road does not run through seventeenth-century Japan anymore.

Here it runs past Fordham Dam.

The Old Poet Didn't Completely Disappear

Readers familiar with Vaultonburg's earlier poetry will recognize another tension running through the collection.

The guy who wrote the older poems is still in there.

He hasn't suddenly become a serene nature poet incapable of cynicism, anger, lust, absurdity or black humor. He has simply acquired another way of looking.

Occasionally the old voice erupts spectacularly.

A blobfish knows nobody is coming into the abyss “to sort their shit out.” Humanity becomes carbon life “broil[ing] / under an angry heat lamp” until somebody announces, “ding! all finished.”

But those moments no longer dominate the landscape.

That's the important transformation.

The darkness hasn't been disproved.

It has been put into proportion.

There are flowers here too.

There is water.

There is another person.

There is tea.

There is an extremely persistent possum.

Small Songs

The final effect of reading more than two hundred pages of Small Songs for Weary Travelers is surprisingly cumulative. Any individual poem may occupy only a few lines, but together they begin to resemble footsteps.

One.

Then another.

Then another.

The book even tells us what to do when direction fails. In “get lost,” the universe keeps changing the signs until the speaker discovers he is “home everywhere.”

And near the end comes “Unravel”:

as i unravel
I become miles of new thread
to weave with again

That poem could almost serve as an alternative introduction to the entire collection.

Something unraveled.

A life became smaller.

Then the world became smaller.

Instead of pretending none of this had happened, the poet followed the loose thread.

He followed it into Zen and haiku, into woods and rivers, into a renewed creative partnership, into Wolf Twin Books, and eventually into this book. Even the physical object acknowledges that companionship: Tré designed the cover, and Small Songs is dedicated simply “For Tré.”

By the end, the smallness introduced on the first page no longer seems small at all.

That may be what Small Songs for Weary Travelers ultimately understands better than most books about renewal: a life does not necessarily have to become what it was in order to become large again.

Sometimes recovery of the world happens at the scale of a haiku.

A crow.

A river.

A cup of tea.

A juniper.

Someone beside you.

And one more step down the road.

Paper Fingers Zine on the Last Day of Poetry Month

We created a PDF file for the Paper Fingers Zine we created at the Paper Fingers event at 317 Collective in March. You can delve into the whole project at www.paperfingers.com It contains the work Rockford area writers David Pedersen, Micky Torpedo, Richard Vargas, Tim Stotz, Travis Legge, Dylan Garcia,  Erica Toldeo, Sky Garcia, Thomas L. Vaultonburg, Christopher Simms, Sharon Nesbit-Davis, Dannie Mathews, and many others. The art department/ilustrators include Joe Tallman, Sarah Reed McNamara, Jenny Mathews, Lucian Kuranz, Taylor Hopkins, Asa E Burnley, Jack Mathews, FoodStamp Davis, with photography by James Hogan, Jenny Mathews, and Ryan Burritt.

It's really rewarding when a project is received well. We sold out the print run of Paper Fingers at Art Scene. And had one helluva time with our cohorts at 317 Art Collective to boot. Thank you so much to everyone who collaborated with us to make this happen. We'll definitely be doing another zine soon.

Thomas L. Vaultonburg is a poet, haikuist, editor, and publisher from Rockford, Illinois. He is the founder and editor of Zombie Logic Press and Zombie Logic Review and co-founder, with artist Tré, of Wolf Twin Books. His work ranges from haiku and short-form nature poetry to absurdist, comic, and surreal poems rooted in the strange details of everyday life.

Vaultonburg is the author of numerous collections, including Vanished Roads, Small Songs for Weary Travelers, Moonscape: Haiku Phase I, Flesh Wounds, Submerged Structure, and Atrocious Poems A to Z. His recent work increasingly explores the landscapes, wildlife, streets, abandoned places, and overlooked corners of northern Illinois.

A longtime admirer of Richard Brautigan, Vaultonburg has often been drawn to poetry that can be funny without surrendering its strangeness: brief poems, unlikely metaphors, conversational language, and jokes that open onto something slightly larger than the joke. “The Yellow River” comes from that side of his work—a small comic poem in which the inflated language of warfare collides with the considerably less heroic realities of the human body.

Vaultonburg has also participated in Rockford's long-running experiments in bringing writing out of books and into public spaces. In March 2019, his work was connected with the Paper Fingers: Mechanical Typewriting in the Digital Age exhibition at 317 Art Collective in Rockford. Curated and hosted by David W. Pedersen, the two-day exhibition combined a type-in, creative-writing experiment, social experiment, historical exploration, and art exhibition. More than fifteen mechanical typewriters were displayed, with visitors invited to sit down and use the machines themselves.

That emphasis on writing as something physical, communal, and slightly unpredictable anticipates much of Vaultonburg's later work in Rockford—poetry appearing not only in books and literary journals but in bookstores, galleries, public-art installations, collaborative exhibitions, and on the streets themselves. Projects such as Hike You!, SECOND NATURE, and his collaborations with Tré continue the same basic impulse: take the poem off the page, put it somewhere unexpected, and see what happens when somebody encounters it.

Dain Sundstedt and the Rockford Poetry Renaissance (That Never Happened)

Dain Sundstedt is one of the promising younger writers, well younger to me, that I have met during my now forty years of organizing and hosting literary events, publishing local writers, and waiting for the Rockford Renaissance.

Sinnissippi

If you look close you can catch a Sinnissipeek

Of a turkey in a tree

Down by the creek

Bands come here to play when it’s warm

But not now when it’s this cold

Sitting in the woods, far below the fold

I listen, write, listen, write

Mother nature speaks if you wait, I am told

Louder than Netflix, all 50 inches

And you can learn a lot more from the finches

This place

This, Place

It’s all outdoors

Always to please and never to bore

Close your eyes, breathe, and be

Sinnissippi

Dust

Can you tell?

There’s dust on the shelves

Dust on the floor

Dust on the door

Dust on the books

Dust in the nooks

Just about everywhere you look

Grown, multiplied, clumped, and smeared

I didn’t ask for it, but it’s here

An indica strain of my laziness

Or time spent doing adventurous things

If I don’t clean it up

my life might do the same

Because a pile of shit grows and grows

if you let it sit for a little bit

My bed doesn’t have any dust on it

Nor does the toilet seat…

I guess that’s a start

I’ll do the rest in the morning

Burnt Toast

No matter which way you slice it,

bread still tastes like bread, and burnt toast still tastes burnt.

You either choose to eat the black, charred, crumbled ash,

or reach for a new slice

This time though, turn the toaster down

Learn from the char

Because we know what happens if you keep the same settings

The taste is too bad to relive

Plus, I hear the grocery down the street has the best new artisan bread in town

So venture out, try it, slather some butter or spread,

whatever your jam

Just be yourself, the toaster will pop when it’s ready

Update — October 2026: Still Waiting for the Rockford Literary Renaissance

Looking back at this introduction, I'm struck by my own optimism. There was, in fact, no Rockford literary renaissance happening at the time, nor has one materialized in the years since. I never heard anything about this particular writer again after publishing his work. That doesn't mean he stopped writing, of course, only that he disappeared from my view. But the larger pattern is familiar. After forty years of involvement in the Rockford literary scene, I have spent an extraordinary amount of time anticipating a cultural awakening that never quite arrives.

I suppose that's partly my own fault. I've always wanted Rockford to become a place where literature matters, where writers are taken seriously, where an actual literary community might develop beyond the occasional reading, self-congratulatory awards ceremony, or short-lived enthusiasm for some promising newcomer. Every few years I convince myself something significant might be happening. And every few years I discover that I'm still waiting.

Consider the Rockford Poet Laureate position. When the position was originally established, I was offered the opportunity and declined. In the years since, the selection process has, at least on one occasion, produced a poet whose literary credentials I could not substantiate with a single credible publication credit. That may seem like an unnecessarily harsh observation, but a poet laureateship is supposed to recognize literary accomplishment. If publication history and demonstrated achievement aren't meaningful considerations, what exactly is being recognized?

The situation with the Rockford Area Arts Awards was equally revealing. When those awards were introduced, literature wasn't even included as a category. Visual artists, musicians, and other creative disciplines received recognition, but apparently it hadn't occurred to anyone that writers might also be artists. I raised the omission publicly and pressed the issue until it became a subject of debate. Eventually, a literary category was added. And whom did they recognize? An out-of-town writer of formulaic romance fiction. Whatever one thinks of that genre, it was a peculiar response to a discussion about recognizing the literary accomplishments of writers in the Rockford area.

None of this is intended to diminish the visual artists who have made meaningful contributions to Rockford's cultural life. Quite the opposite. Rockford has invested considerable attention, publicity, institutional support, and civic pride in its visual arts community. I have worked alongside many of those artists and admire what they've accomplished. What I question is why literature has so consistently been treated as an afterthought, something to acknowledge only when someone complains loudly enough about its absence.

A literary renaissance requires more than a handful of people writing poems. It requires a culture that recognizes, encourages, publishes, discusses, and preserves literature. It requires institutions capable of distinguishing sustained literary achievement from local celebrity or organizational convenience. Most importantly, it requires a community that believes its writers are worth paying attention to before somebody from somewhere else tells them so.

Forty years is a long time to wait for a renaissance. I've published the books, edited the journals, organized the readings, encouraged younger writers, and tried to create some of the infrastructure I kept hoping would emerge organically. I still believe there are talented writers in Rockford. There always have been. But the existence of individual talent is not the same thing as the existence of a literary culture.

I would be delighted to be proven wrong. In fact, I've spent much of my adult life hoping to be proven wrong.

For now, though, the Rockford literary renaissance remains what it was when I first wrote this introduction: something I wanted badly enough to imagine I could already see it happening.

Todd Moore, The Founding Force of Outlaw Poetry, and Dennis Gulling's The Blood Dark Sea

Most people don't know this, even people sort of well-versed in the history of the small press, but Outlaw Poetry was started right here in the Rockford area. Belvidere to be exact. By an English teacher at Belvidere High School named Todd Moore. I read with Todd Moore several times, including one time in a basement in Stillman Valley with another legendary small press poet, Lyn Lifshin. he is one of the few poets I ever sent a fan letter to, and my geographical proximity had nothing to do with that. He was a revered small press poet, and probably had a better chance being recognized in Los Angeles than here in Rockford. Like virtually every small press poet I wrote to, including Charles Bukowski, he turned out to be friendly, encouraging, and took time to answer my questions about what it meant to be a small press poet.

Dillinger by Todd Moore

he made an impression on a great many prospective writers, including one of his students, Dennis Gulling. So much so that Dennis became a sort of protege of Todd Moore, and began writing his own impressive Outlaw Poetry during high school. For nearly thirty years he has been quietly compiling some of the most impactful poetry of anyone writing in the Midwest. Because of his reclusive nature this has gone unnoticed to many. But those who know speak the name of Dennis Gulling with a respect and appreciation for his canon of work.

Now, for the first time, his poetry has been collected into a full-length book of poems, The Blood Dark Sea. The selections were made by Dennis Gulling himself, and compiled and published by Zombie Logic Press, also of Rockford, Illinois. I am, in fact, the editor of that book, Thomas L. Vaultonburg, and I can report the more I read these poems, and I believe I may have read them more than anyone else on Earth, besides Dennis Gulling, the more I am convinced this is a tour de force of not only Outlaw Poetry, but poetry itself. 

I start out this sequential set of poems from The Blood Dark Sea with the poet's own ode to his mentor, Todd Moore. 

SOMETHING FOR TODD

The words poured off him like water

Through a broken dam

I was sucked

Into the flood

Clear and cold

Held under by its weight

And I’ve been

Drowning ever since

Diving deeper

Into the darkness

HOW I LOST $10

Bill Quincer banged on

My back door with a towel

Wrapped around one hand

Said he’d cut off

A finger with his band saw

And wanted me to drive

Him to the hospital

On the way over

He took a bloody handkerchief

From his shirt pocket

Held up the finger

And said

What’ll you give me

If I walk into the emergency room

With this thing up my nose?

 TRENCH COAT

The guy in the trench coat

Paced back and forth

Outside Goodman’s Cafeteria

With his hands pushed

Deep in his pockets

Putting his face to the window

Every few minutes

Until he fell back suddenly

Into the shadows

As a guy in a leather jacket

Came out the door and started

Down the street

Trench coat stepped out

Of the darkness

And said a man’s name to his back

Leather jacket turned around

And his eyes got big

He made a run for it

While a pointy bulge

Appeared in trench coat’s right pocket

Something popped

And leather jacket was pasted

To the air just for a second

Then he started walking

Like the sidewalk had melted

Did that for a few yards

Then stopped in his tracks

In front of Greenberg’s Variety

His legs jackknifed at the knees

And he went over sideways

Between 2 parked cars

Trench coat’s giggle

Was broken glass in the night

He danced a little jig

Then walked the other way

SHE SHOT HIM

She shot him

In the head 3 times

Then chopped his fingers off

With a hatchet

And put them in her purse

Beside chewing gum

Kotex and keys

Later

At the Hoot ‘n’ Holler Café

She dropped a thumb

In an ashtray

Next to a smoking butt

And laughed

All the way out the door

EVIL

A voice in his head

Told him his index finger

Was evil

So he took a ginsu knife

And cut it off

Then he left the house

Until the evil could

Run out the open end

His wife came home

From the grocery store

And dropped her bag of stuff

When she saw all the blood

On the kitchen counter

Then noticed the finger

On the floor pointing toward

The front door like it was saying

He went that-a-way