Outside is the rain half the world waits for as much as we hate it at times; it gives us whatever we can gather from the energy that is frozen and makes up the world I swore I’d never live in. But like everything else it passes on its way to teaching me which way to turn. In the meantime, left with nothing but dreams and memory, I’m practicing for the death we all know is coming, that none of us know how to face. I keep trying the prayers and other means as if each could be a plot twist in the novel I keep wishing I could write. All I want to end with is the person who points down the street.
Directions
Further Reading
Kitchen Notes for Oldest Daughters Who Were Never Taught to Cook
by Amanda Roth
Chocolate Cake Ingredients ▢ 1½ cups all-purpose flour ▢ ¼ cup unsweetened childhood memories, thoroughly sifted ▢ ⅓ cup vegetable oil (an oldest daughter) ▢ 1 cup water (her mother) ▢ 1 teaspoon white vinegar (her father) ▢ 1 cup sugar or artificial sweetener (see also: the way the parents act differently in public) ▢ […]
TRENY #7 (ON THE DEATH OF HIS DAUGHTER, URSZULA) by Jan Kochanowski (translated by Leonard Kress)
Hangars draped with clothes you’ll never wear; they miss the warm touch of your body. Moths will soon begin to feed upon that cloth; what rhetoric will persuade me now to clear your closet out? The iron sleeps beside the starch, ribbons remain wrinkled and knotted under the golden clasp…Flowers on your dress, potted in […]
Andrew Hudgins interviewed by Okla Elliott: Nothing Human Is Foreign to Laughter
Andrew Hudgins is the author of The Joker (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2013), American Rendering: New and Selected Poems (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2010), Shut Up, You’re Fine: Poems for Very, Very Bad Children (Overlook Press 2009), Ecstatic in the Poison (Sewanee/Overlook Press 2003), Babylon in a Jar (Houghton Mifflin 1998), The Glass Anvil (University of Michigan 1997), Saints and Strangers, After The Lost War: A Narrative, The Never-Ending: New […]
