Colin Pope The Excess Stages of Grief I’d pull up to the big intersection where Elm rams headlong into crosstown four-lane trafficand gape through the windshield. I was going somewhere I’d think, the radio afroth, boiling love down to salt and tallow.This must be depression, I’d sing, nodding, turning for the pet store where […]
Rhonda McDonnell Remembrance Stone babies—that’s how such remembered thingsare: they nestle, hibernating insideto wake yearly with kickings and stirrings of sorrows forgotten that still abidein my body. Limbs intertwining linkgrief upon grief unbirthed, embedded, sightunseen. Held so long, turned gray, not flushed pinkbut bloodless, this easily ignored blight returns. Again, I see His body […]
Collin Callahan The Backwash of the Dead for Matthew Schumacher Insects scritch in soybean stubble.On a lost betyou paw the detachedtwo door for gasoline canisters while I muffle the omnipresent stench of a cereal plantwith another stale cowboy killer. Cystic acnesandhills spew fire ants in the pale stadiumbetween our headlamps. We get highoff playing […]
Kerry Donoghue Capable Maybe you’d joked too much.It wasn’t your first rodeo—your little girl was already two.So why not share your happy news at just six weeks?It’d likely be a Halloween birth.You placed a bet about delivering in costume, that scene from Alien.No need to be so uptight this time around.A simple text informed […]
Natalie Wee When my grandmother begins to forget This sentence begins where her memory ends: my grandmotheron the beach in the evening, calf-deep in water. The shoreline glittering amber bottles & a second set of footprints. Her palmsshatter the foam’s pale roof, then emerge, clean & hollow. The simplest migration. No proof of motion […]
Read More… from Natalie Wee – When my grandmother begins to forget
Jessica Lynn Suchon Penumbra Child again, I steal my mother’s thimbles: little bellsring on each fingertip, wedding bells, stiffsteel skirts forever twirling open. Once it was like this: I was a girl. Each night my mothertucked me into bed, tickled her fingers acrossmy forehead, down the bridge of my slender nose, promised pleasant dreams, […]
Ted Mathys Gold Dredge Fog-white, bulky as a five-story factory,the dredge is shipwrecked in its own pond.Atlantis, not sunken but abandoned. I lean on a railing in the winch room.A bead of sweat drips from my noseto an acquisitive minnow that flashes to greet it. The pond is ringed by dead men: pines and […]
Robert Fillman The Blue Hour Twenty years since I stood waitingby the third-floor bedroom windowat dusk, thinking about the ghoststories my grandfather recycledthose cold Pennsylvania daysjust after we set back the clocks,gained the extra blue hour of light,that sacred time when the livingand the dead can see each other. I remember the steam whirlingfrom […]
E. Kristin Anderson Find an Answer in Floorboards or Flowers (a golden shovel after Kesha) This summer I hold myself in the shadow of honey; I don’tremember how to be warm. Show me the water and I’ll careto raise hell, carry light in a rosewood bowl—I know who’s planning a coup. I’ll stay, finish […]
Read More… from E. Kristin Anderson – Find an Answer in Floorboards or Flowers
