Contributed By: Allison Blevins
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 our car,
ran his hands slowly up her legs, pushed
his dry thumb inside her, then walked away.
Return to table of contents for Issue 10 Fall 2016.
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…
—found in an interview with actor Levar Burton, who is African-American Listen: I'm gonna be honest with you. This is a practice I engage in every time I'm stopped by law enforcement. I've taught this…
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…
At 42 I woke with one breast in a single suitcase in the cemetery of bell towers We were lucky in a ghost fog I miss you since I’ve lived bone atoll lonely I told Ellen it will kill me this time I said, Take the cats, too I’m worried. You’re a […]
for Shuqualak, Mississippi Whereas the sea creates music, the sky can also bend to the ground & strum the earth apart, leave it totally undone but singing. Afterward, the space the storm leaves between ground & cloud fills with saw teeth & spinning lights. They have a way of cleaning things— of rubbing the sky […]
First, there is the long—still—opening—shot—of freeway traffic outside my office window, flowing in one direction, heavy, and menacing, and gray, like flood debris carried on a strong current through the central business district. Over this, a white expanse of sterile sky dreaming in the color blue. The scene speaks to us all of the human […]
