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 a newspaper on his bench seat. I just got bit. After Labor Day, the ice cream van that played the theme from“The Sting” and Bach fugues stopped making its crawling rounds. I just now noticed it gone. Soon it will be summer again, I believe for a moment. Vampires are cool. That’s why they are so cool. I could explain everything, will be my last joke. My arrangements are not up to date. I prefer Basie’s. The rumor around the mill village is that a nuclear scientist haunts my house. I have denied nothing. I like to look at salt even more than I like to use it, it is so clean and chaste, making the heavy water lighter, lighter than the sea that drained from his scalpeled cheek in the midst. That shoe, later it got rained on, almost sweetly, but too late.
Further Reading
How to Drink Tea in the Colonies by Dana Kroos
I. Mugs are for coffee. Tea is served in china cups with handles too small to get your fingers through, on saucers, with a spoon, on a tray which also holds cream and sugar and (when you are very fortunate) scones and jam. Although these things are for you, they are not yours for the […]
Southern Thundering
by Gustav Hibbett
This poem was selected as a finalist for the 2021 MAYDAY Poetry Prize. I. It wasn’t until today I learned that tornadoes are born from thunderstorms. I have only ever known the kind that come on in the evenings, soft but flanked with wind, bearing shade to ease late summer heat. I only know […]
Jennifer Spiegel interviewed by David Abrams: Adult Anxiety
Sybil Weatherfield is a 30-year-old hot mess. A temp worker in New York City flitting from job to job, Sybil is the riveting main character of Jennifer Spiegel’s debut novel Love Slave (Unbridled Books). She has a boyfriend and is in love with another guy (the lead singer in the band Glass Half Empty), has issues with […]
