There is so much reality it often escapes me. Even at dinner, while chewing root vegetables, the excess bursts from my mouth with each bite. I think it a trickle of beet juice and dab it with a napkin. Bacon sizzles and pops on the stove with abundant verity and I think how good, but am […]
Poetry
What the Mind Hungers for
The Mind as a Poor City Planner
by Michael T. Young
Like these abandoned buildings along the boulevard some good ideas can fall into disrepair: dark in their vacancies, whole sections of wall broken. Year after year weather beats deeper into their exposed beams and we learn to live around their uselessness: take a different bus to work, find another store to get the milk and […]
Song
by Michael T. Young
The first sentence of a certain history is written near an estuary, in a building with no address, behind the last door, at the end of a hall lined with pinewood paneling. One of those panels, when it was a tree, held a robin’s nest, and one of that bird’s young managed to leap from […]
Scottish Husband
by Tori Grant Welhouse
Where do you come from? He doesn’t mean my address. She’s a Yank. She can’t help it. We meet in the Bird in Hand. The jukebox and its revelations. I pull pints in a shop window. He tells me later about my ass and the deal with a candle. The dampest cold pervades. I have […]
The Hazards
by Jane O. Wayne
I must wait while the sugar melts… Henri Bergson Every few steps on the dunes, she loses her foothold––slipping, climbing again. Too occupied to look back. The beach. The waves. Every particle in motion. She has ridden a horse that would not stop cantering when she pulled the reins; hands clenched, she still holds […]
In Defense of the Marriage Act
by Barbara Kreader Skalinder
Freshman year – Hell Week hazing found you bathed in lust. If only Mrs. Davis LCW had confirmed your fear you were gay. Instead you, the boy I chose, called me nymphomaniac on our wedding night, and I agreed, put away my ice-white chemise. the man I still loved, phoned: Rescue me. I’m obsessed with men […]
Wonders
by Katherine Riegel
The Mississippi River ran backwards more than once. A real flight simulator—one pilots train in— makes you feel like you’re flying, even though it’s only a screen in front and six hydraulic legs simulating motion. A hummingbird hawk-moth’s wings beat eighty-five times per second. One summer night in 1975, you believed—absolutely, without […]
Helpless
by Katherine Riegel
What matters? The last of a species died lonely today and still the stars spun, like everything spins, helpless. They say we should not attribute human feelings to nonhumans but isn’t helplessness universal? The car door helpless to stop before it crushes fingers, the naked politician helpless to swing that thing between his […]
Driving Through Alabama
by Katherine Riegel
Spring has dropped purples and yellows like someone with so much abundance they’re careless of loss. Hot pink azalea bushes crouch round across lawns and I dream they wander, peaceful as cows but wiser. I’m not from here, but even I know the movies get it wrong. No, I don’t believe everyone who voted […]
Shortcut
by Sergio Ortiz
There is a pain – so utter – It swallows substance up – Emily Dickinson, poem 599 The windows open to the guardianship of the sun. But there is distant smoke in its presence, traces of an aftermath, a landslide of fumes vacating the shredded heart, a porous sea, a sliding […]
