I can’t remember why “boomerang” brings me so painfully into my own sights. The medicine has stopped nothing, nor was it intended to. These twin jars of split peas, I boil them for days. They will not soften, as I do. I try to work up the nerve to listen to some music. Is it so wrong to end a sentence with a pronoun? I haven’t licked a stamp for years, not with this tongue. You have to run to taste the wind, says my dog from his leash, says my friend from Orofino, to his. Chase the grass, then, in the wind down a long hill. Suffering is not, as it turns, its own schadenfreude. My friend stayed wrong about that. My stomach: still tender where she shot it, though I did not feel anything at the time. I felt nothing. It was quicker than the fall of an eyelash. The beauty berry bushes have spread, and their day-glo fruit hangs in bends throughout the forest. Words that matter can’t be words.
Further Reading
The Cousin’s Secret
by Lindsay Wilson
This poem was nominated for The Best of the Net and was selected as a finalist for the 2021 MAYDAY Poetry Prize. When her eldest son died, her youngest and I placed two fighting beta fish into the small pond by the front door. You need to understand how much they were promised. […]
THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS AND OTHER POEMS by David R. Slavitt
from THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS AND OTHER POEMS LSU Press, 2009 by David R. Slavitt THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS 1. Pride Surely, there must be some mistake. I admit at once that my name is there with the other six, but after all, if you look at what I am and what I […]
A Dovecote at a Medieval Manor House Ruin in Oxfordshire
by Stephen Gibson
Two workers were repairing it the day we visited— one worker passing thatch to one on a ladder; our friend Judy, a photographer, said this was a favorite place for her: the dovecote once bred pigeons and doves for the dinner table: chambers inside—when the manor house was inhabited— filled with squabs and […]
