The Irish weather demands a black umbrella, but I prefer green over black. I see green in ways the morning light comes up over the green tree divide that separates the city from green-plastic- covered potato mounds. Being a crop inspector is serious business. There’s been a few cropped heads because men with hatchets remember […]
Poetry
VISITING THE MODERN ART MUSEUM by David Gibbs
If I exchange 8 dollars for a ticket the man with a slim mustache will let me see big screen tits and curlicue pubic hair above a nudist colonist’s penis. How subtle our snickers when what we want is behind glass, is the same as how we pet a cat at 3 a.m., drunk, on […]
WHAT JENNY TRIED TO SAY by David Dasher
summer leaves have two faces: toward the sun they swelter grim as anyone can; in the wind-pushed rain they jump & run & their dull pallor brightens the sudden light and the sudden dark. also the black streets are silvered, the thick yellow sun-cages dissolved into gray distances. my love and my joy, which are […]
SUPPORT GROUP: MENTAL ILLNESS by David Dasher
Step, and step, and step, and step, down to the basement, always the basement, kicking salt-slush off boots against every stair, the basement overheated, overlit like an incubator, with skittery sparrows in the lobby, lounging watchful, then the move to the meeting-room, pushing chairs into circles, lopsided as eggs—Who’s first? Who will be first? Who […]
ADAM’S LETTER TO LILITH by David Dasher
Since He took you away I still do no work, and never break a sweat. Mostly I’ve taken to making the animals mate for my amusement. So I, like my Maker, have brought forth new life: one creature, the mule, eyes me cantankerously and resents being fed. I spend much time with it, feeling like, […]
ORE: an excerpt from Ore, the third book of Christophe Casamassima’s Proteus Cycle
In the beginning was the word He bore his threefold soul in his hand His poems: singing theses Even the winds will shy away from their dust. His subjects swell with size streetnoises, loving sleigh We look and we see Requiem No poetry before ours in the insane who clip you and store you Ping, […]
SIGHING DAMNS THE WORLD by Jerrod Bohn
In tree blown slippers’ nightingale gauze she remembers awake a squawk murder of angels zither less crave of field crows Grafts feathers fallen (one two other) some sewn into her hair sleeves woven limb to laurel leaves plunking gut strings above her head Want: haloes of glass beads the kind drunk girls noosen their necks […]
GOATSPEAK by Jerrod Bohn
bastard rhythm-jigs’ cloven hooves scatter earth song beat hearth pulse bleat turtledoves with fire tongues’ sharpened fork-lick brambles thorn whips and throw blood on pine trees stomp grape skins juice-stained knees’ buckle bow snap syllables pop pelvis pile another palm frond on the fire that lyre too string-gap music’s flames aspire to source inspire exaltations […]
LA SIRENA by Katie Atkinson
—after Julia Fernandez Sanchez’s painting her breasts are empty shells. (she has no children to feed—she eats her young before their lungs are formed, swallowing them in yellow slurping gulps.) her skin is brown, la sirena sienna. her hands are firm and sand-callused, and a tree of knowledge about the bodies of men sprouts from her head. […]
THE HADITHA DAM by M. C. Armstrong
Soviet cement, Yankee tenants, Belches of Euphrates Pass SEALs on the eastern shore Contractors in ramshackle camps to the west. An ex-swat cop in a tea-cloth told me not to swim Unless I wanted cancer like the Hadithans, As if to confirm the rumors of Chemical Ali’s hidden stash— The secret flow. Every paper boy […]
