Category: Poetry
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Eternal Life
by John Schellhase I remember going into a voting booth, the bluetruncated curtains rustling by my hair, my hand on my father’s jeans, the shoes of the other votersvisible around us. When we left, the sky was dark – the night falls early in November – and the cloudswere moving across the face of the…
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Breaking Camp
by Michael Lauchlan Young parents caught in the hot,improbable grappling of marriage,we heaved into a dumpster a largemisshapen chair, filling our lungswith what remained of the week’s trashand years of curdled grease.We turned toward each other,toward a beach we’d all but forgotten,toward what we couldn’t hope to recognize–a footpath leading here. Your fatherhad taken some…
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A Family Portrait
by Cecil Morris We poured our only daughter in the seawhere we’d left my father three years before.My wife held to me, I held to our son,and he upended the bag, her cremains,the grit and gosh of her, there where the seaseethed against the rocks, the waves in turmoilof coming, going, coming, rush and suckand…
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On the Bridge After the Flood
by Deron Eckert A rubber duck floats down the riveralong with baby clothes and toys,a left behind walker since there is nowalking on water, and God knows what elsesince you can’t bear to see people’s livesrushed away in the flash of a floodthat you’ll never understand if you haven’tlived though one or did what you…
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Bike Route, Minneapolis
by Joanne Esser Below street level I look up at familiar buildings that have grown Four stories, windows dark, cool inside, concealing business of the city. Along the edges, patches of red, orange, yellow with secret black hearts. Painted blossoms rise enormous above real ones as if they’re sisters. Sparrows hop…
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Everytime I Pass This I Wonder What Happens
by Robin Gow Along Route 29 I have seen a dead self standing on the side of the roadlooking for a ride home. I keep going. There was a moment when this farm was vacated.When a body grabbed all her bones and disappeared. Then the ghosts came. The thing about death is thatit is not…
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La Sonnanbula
by Dale Going Disinclined to dredge up the old efflorescence, my heart, a relatively lucky bauble, operated this trenchant December independent of drenched weather less photogenic than snow. Awakened in whether nor’wester by the Bay’s first-ever tornado warning, we wafted through the cellarless house like Balanchine’s La Sonnambula searching for safe ground: pirouetting remnants of…
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Logan
by Nick Visconti Here is the river no one owns, claimedby runoff sediments innervatingfloodplains. I look north and see jets,international, kipping above the clouds,banking on ground-level trust, the pilotshave eyes good enough to count seeds,the absurd amount of seeds lemons house,or the thread counts of a motel’s bed sheets.I’m here to search, and it only…