I’m in Orlando, the magic kingdom of every thing. Magic tricks God out of taking what can’t be remembered As boredom’s least expected twin sister. Please read While listening to Madame Gahndi’s “Yellow Sea.” The magician reveals a piece of you, you didn’t know was there. One of the most beautiful tricks of fall? […]
Poetry
DELTA 14: On Our Last Walk Past the Edge of the Neighborhood I Noticed a Man Patching His Fence
DELTA 13: As We Walked the Sand Ending in the San Francisco Cliffsides
by David Koehn
If you are not in a hurry I will make a pot of coffee too. The riptides pull at the coast speaking in the tongues Oceans speak. The gulls rip their way through the lift And account for the folk sitting inside their Toyotas, V.W.s, Chevrolets, in the lot at the corner of x […]
After a Phone Call From My Daughter
Cindy Veach
Somehow the sapling bears it. Bears it and beautiful. Doubled over with its load of fresh snow. All things being in its favor today— velocity of the wind, water content of the flakes— today’s storm will not break it. But how close to the edge, the snap, the crack? What […]
Dad Watches Us Walk to School, Watertown, 1959
by Cindy Veach
It’s pouring. Mom’s pregnant again, on bed rest. Kindergarten and first grade. We’re allowed to walk to school. Alone. He says he watched us from the window. Leave the house in our yellow slickers. Cross the street. Turn right. Holding hands. He’s brought this memory up so many times— My big brother. Me. […]
Video—Nuremberg Museum
by Stephen Gibson
He watches from a field; he’s there to gloat— the video is from a cattle-car point of view; grinning, the boy draws a finger across his throat. The middle of nowhere—mountains, small, remote; the name of some village no one ever knew— he watches from a field; he’s there to gloat. A […]
A Dovecote at a Medieval Manor House Ruin in Oxfordshire
by Stephen Gibson
Two workers were repairing it the day we visited— one worker passing thatch to one on a ladder; our friend Judy, a photographer, said this was a favorite place for her: the dovecote once bred pigeons and doves for the dinner table: chambers inside—when the manor house was inhabited— filled with squabs and […]
Graffiti at a Medieval Manor House Ruin in Oxfordshire
by Stephen Gibson
There were graffiti, initials, dates carved everywhere, much of it around doorjambs which had no doors; much also around window frames where the air just passed through—there was no more glass, not even shards, anywhere. Alice S. and Robert W. visited before the Great War. They carved their initials, in 1912, with great care. […]
Sourcing a Memory of My Brother While My Family and I Clear Brush Before the Rupture of the Oroville Dam
by Ronald Dzerigian
We hit each other with severed branches, under green ponderosa, before the drought, thirty years ago. Gopher snakes wove their grey and brown houndstooth skins around the wild mint that grew near waterways that would evaporate as we got older, finally, and stopped playing with sticks. Now, the creeks have begun to […]
Five Poems
by Simon Perchik
* With the bedrock it needs though this city was built on rainwater :shards pieced together the way pots imbedded in ancient dirt let these dead drink by steps from stone scented with curtains still damp except for evenings lowered by hand into the last drop and foothold –pole to pole is what the graves […]
Reading an Article with a Chunk Missing, Chewed by the Dog
by Charlene Fix
Reading an article with a chunk missing, chewed by the dog, is a little like going to the bathroom during a movie, then returning to your seat relieved, or your child relieved, a portion missing now forever from the story. The thread of discourse severed and randomly spliced, you may as well build a […]
