You’re pulled out of your eyes through a shredder of venetian blinds. Your breath, cold and disrobed, wanders from your throat out to the red barn where embers it remembers fell back in their birch-tinder beds. Are you waiting for dawn songs and drums? Morning to slink across the yard in her fragrance of stale […]
Poetry
The Body by Ellen Elder
At 42 I woke with one breast in a single suitcase in the cemetery of bell towers We were lucky in a ghost fog I miss you since I’ve lived bone atoll lonely I told Ellen it will kill me this time I said, Take the cats, too I’m worried. You’re a […]
Poem for the Next Stranger I Meet by Ron Czerwien
Night in infinite decline, it doesn’t matter. Stooges club each other for joy, while a scale of ascending bleats weigh the peripheries. From border crossing to interrogation cell, a split hair. I feel the urge to lift this curtain between us with my teeth. I’m a jokester and a terror. To think some agitated dust […]
Norwegian Deer Trails by Rob Cook
(for Matthew Savoca, 1945-1994) Mid-March and the sky still buried in the front yard, I look out the window at the deer leading daylight back into the woods— Followed all winter by their own tracks, they must know where the wind sleeps and which tree the snow is coming from. * Today on the phone […]
On the Four Train to the Ends of the Moon by Rob Cook
In the boy’s hand the cell phone sleeping, a tiny animal. He found it this morning curled inside his coat pocket. When he places it against his ear, does the animal plant its eggs? When the boy presses it deeper, can he hear its brain trembling? Can he hear the man named Arturo sitting beside […]
Made in Part from Corn or Corn-Fed Animals by Jason Lee Brown
“…to have some corn with your corn.” — Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma 1. The family’s unsatisfied appetite* moans morning and night. Father and Mother slumber off the mattress* hungry for more food*. Daughter and Baby stay warm between comforters* and linens*. * Cob: the plant’s most valuable product. * We are proud America’s number one […]
The Voice of Water by Michael T. Young
It sounds like grape leaves shaking. It cushions like thick grass underfoot. Its currents spread beyond the range of mountains which is why sometimes people mistake it for the distant trickle of the sun setting. The error depends on which way they’re walking, and if the wind is blowing from the north or south. It […]
Study for Infatuation by Michael T. Young
Sometimes the blue sky threatens, the lilac conceals some danger. But it passes like a cougar stalking among the boulders and deciding mysteriously to move on. You don’t know, but something you did or didn’t do, saved your life. And what might have happened had you turned your back on this sunset, this rotting fence […]
What Is Light? by John Sibley Williams
What is rain to us soaked to bone who could enter the warmest house but who linger unchained in this open field? * What is faith to us sequestered in a windowless room- aglow in neon and lamps without shades and a gavel driven into a wooden table in a room without room? […]
The Language of Shadows by John Sibley Williams
Act I Evening cannot fully digest its own seeds or come to terms with its darker progeny so choking on each bite it devours what came before, what it knows as simple prey. And day grows old in its father’s mouth until even upon a stepladder light can no longer reach the highest cupboards where […]
