Mary Ardery __________ For A Moment The day you detoxed on the trail was alsothe day we found a monarch. It struggledat our feet as we sat eating lunch, tunayou couldn’t keep down. With your bile-chapped lips, you named the creatureAthena, and gently, you took her bodytwitching in your hand.…
Read MoreJames Penha __________ Uncle Ray’s Mirror When, every Sunday, we arrived at The Houseafter the 12:15 mass for dinner with my grand-parents and my mother’s youngest sister wholived there along with the eldest, Jo, the father’sfavorite whose glass eye trembled in lieu of the realone blasted with a BB by…
Read MoreJoseph Sigurdson __________ Letter Nothing’s gone from this white-trash lakeside where young mothers pull honey-buns from their bras and where xanax salesmen can’t spell their own product. You remember the elephantine man. He’s one of the few drunks who nurses me benzodiazepine tea until the petrified spiders are off every…
Read MoreZachary Bond __________ Treating Mania I light a path of candles with my tongue, forkingmyself facefuls of manna, drinking a gallon of hellebore tea. I bathe in a brewof rose oil & lotuswater. The horizon in my stomach continues to flip. The clock inside ticks sideways. Coffinblackcrows paint the sky.…
Read MoreAlice B. Fogel __________ Beautiful What if what you had will befrom a distance clear though it had beenup close indecipherableit could end …
Read MoreDidi Goldenhar __________ Rake How do you make a moral life? Sophiewrites, and later I head to the gardenwith ball of string to save my infant peashoots, tying them on rusty wrought iron.Thank blooming green tulips, thank cilantroand geraniums in cedar boxes.I’m stumped. Humility? Among my hunches—woman kneeling in dirt,…
Read MoreSummer, Corpus Christie Joddy Murray __________ These cobblestone foreheadspeppered in long genetic lines—like head ivy, like finger flowers—pocked in 7th grade and contended:now find a landing strip for my bicycleor throw once more the rusted hatchetinto unfinished garage walls. Sweatfills all these ridges, drips ontosage-green, plastic saladbowls used for corn…
Read MoreAmy Hassinger __________ When Asked to Clean Your Room “Come see my museum,” you say,and you lead me, a hand on my arm,to your window seat,where you have arranged your collection of treasures,each grouping labeled in careful ballpoint printon a folded piece of notebook paper. There are rose quartz and…
Read MoreSpark Jed Myers __________ Restless at night, I stepped outon the deck. High in the blackbetween a blink and the next, a brightorange speck streaked left-to-right on an earthward slant.It burned out before it could reachthe treetops, before I could thinktwo words for it—tiny torch, match struck and unlitso quick,…
Read MoreBirds Without Music Christopher Locke __________ 5,000 red-winged blackbirdsrain unbidden from an Arkansassky like trench coats shot to pieces,streets and lawns ankle-deep in littlebodies. A white-crested laughingthrush bloated under a scrim of wastewater at the Miami Zoo, its blackstreak across the eyes like an homageto Annie Lennox until I reconsider,sure…
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