Contributed By: Nick Conrad
Metered sunshine. Wind rationed, and rain.
A heaven for incrementalists,
with chaos always just around the corner.
Is it any wonder that he had grown
too fond of night, of the ruined castles
that lined the Rhine. What was there
to do, now that the moon no longer
drifted toward fullness, that tonight,
orange sail unfurled, it plows
through a bank of clouds. There is that,
he thought, that thin peach slice
leaning against a ripe gooseberry.
Return to table of contents for Issue 12 Winter 2018.
Sometimes I believe in something like karma, or not that, exactly, but the idea that if bad occurs to me, I probably deserve it, like the skinned knee I received after a jog—in my apartment…
You lie awake, tired and lonesome underneath a horrifyingly new patchwork blanket of your dead grandfather's old clothing. The boy dropped you off thirty minutes ago, and you walked the half mile up your secluded…
Issue 12 Winter 2018 RUTH AWAD is an award-winning Lebanese-American poet whose debut poetry collection, Set to Music a Wildfire, won the 2016 Michael Waters Poetry Prize from Southern Indiana Review Press. She is the recipient of…
When I close my eyes I see the child in me hug the hour hand licked by the flame of memory emerging in stark darkness a faint light filters through cracks a half-open door…
Beloved, I’m tired and this drying body remembers the crane- white of your nails tonight. The widows come in limp droves everyday and my ears scorch with their words. Today, Shanta told me “They gave me powders to choke my daughter.” Her hands kept fluttering to her head as if to touch dream hair. Sometimes […]
On that lawn each morning a little girl’s sandal rests in the grass. Today the flip-flop for weeks became a pink gellie, the color of my skin disease, but lighter. The white truck gassing mosquitoes just whined by in the dark, convincing no one. I wonder, as if to say goodbye, if the driver has […]
Listen— I coach basketball in the South Bronx that’s what I do and earlier today we lost in the city playoffs our fourth quarter comeback came up three points short and after the game I sat by my favourite player a little lefty point guard with a big heart who doesn’t take shit from anybody […]
