Contributed By: Allison Blevins
Keep watch over your children. Forget about linger and loaf. Think of all the yeses you’ve spoken. Aim to be small. Remember loving the sound of some place: a hum or a whoosh. When the men come, when they swell, chests puffed full of gospeled breath, let them come.
Be broken like kindling. Remember your mother’s perfume. Think of the hills, deep and lasting. Keep watch over your feet. Slink into the cracks in the sidewalk. Be mud.
Return to table of contents for Issue 10 Fall 2016.
I’m going to stop coming out in the usual I don’t want to offend you way. I’ll tell the next children’s librarian who asks me my husband’s name about the time a cop held my wife against…
An animal scared silent, rabbit atremble in the morning grass, belly fur slick to the ground, the ground warming to the hands of sun and light. A salt lick, discovered in a day-to-day field, crusted…
Hoohooooooo a man kneels down before an even more powerful man his hand imagines a cat with lonely fur curtain seltzer weapon lover as the train whistle scratches the face of distances a…
Issue 10 Summer 2016 TERRY ADAMS has poems in Poetry, Ironwood, The Sun, Witness, College English, The Painted Bride Quarterly,and elsewhere. He MCs poetry events at the Beat Museum in San Francisco and in La Honda, California. His first collection, Adam’s Ribs, is available from Off…
The sky gray as dishrags, she wore anyway cutoffs and a pink bikini top, black mascara, inked snake forever curling up her thigh. As if to gather up some secret sun, she leaned into the fence. Then slipped a menthol between her lips. More than once I’ve seen her leg her way into a rust-bitten […]
When your young sons come to visit, we decide to go camping—last time we went to the apple orchard and before that the circus. We are new to this state, new to living away from your sons, so we choose a campground by way of the map. The road curves and curves and curves again […]
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 […]
