Category: Poetry
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Ask Me and I’ll Tell You
by Annie Przypyszny about the woman who lives in an open grave. She’s not crazy. She’s versed in Edith Wharton, Emily Post, the final poems of Keats. Her Anne Klein dress is only slightly soiled, only a tad moth- nibbled. The oak leaves in her hair appear intentional. She adorns her rich brown walls with…
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Ampoule
by Angie Macri Race through the language, a circuit of lawslike men hunting for brides, rosein their teeth. Girls line up in white, bits of bonefitted as hourglass. The sand runsuntil it’s done. They cast their fathers’ names asideand take the new, covered by the title, Mrs.now. They never have to use their own name…
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Home in the Hurricane
By Sarah Spaulding Avento I open my body to you. Half-eaten Jack – o -lantern a smile tilts through the cracks. The fans buzz and you say it’s too early to think of fall. Just this morning a tropical storm. Houseplants weeping. The skin of our house lashed. My car stopped in the middle of…
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Scrub Pine Grown
By D. Eric Parkison Leaving me like this, nodding In the breeze, locked in knots From withdraw, from flicker, Fleeing the scene Where I am: cinched in a forest Cut by incandescences. This wooded trouble. My doubled being Dribbling through the branches. A wooden thought: strength of layers. Seeing where you twisted Away by the…
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Bargaining At My Husband’s Bedside, Coronary Step Down Unit, 2002
By Jeanne Bryner “So we move another summer closer to our last summer together—“ –Linda Pastan Your groin’s bruise, purple like mother’s iris. They bloom in June just for your birthday, she lied to the girl I was. The fair’s gone; we can’t be eighteen again. There’s a bell to ring, but no sledge for…
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my father loves me best at the dim sum table
By Sabrina Siew we sit opposite each other, a Sunday tradition. the chrysanthemums pushed down in hot water, like the knees of his tar-haired child on American soil. only one teacup quiet on tablecloth, he doesn’t ask for more, but orders my bing seoi before I can speak. here, I am little, the lazy susan…
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In Praise of Dirt
By David Salner Dirt, dust, and mud; gumbo of ground bone; two million femurs in wet earth of the wide and charming Volga; Tibia shards underfoot near the placid Elbe; not to mention cranium bits along the meandering waters of the Vistula; and the tidal Ota, whose sediment is home to delicate wrists, all those…
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Assisted Living
by Jeanne Bryner Beside his chair walks a shadow but where’s the candle to lift, to light what patron saint protects him? Our town’s wheelchair man, legs bent and angled, crooked feet shod. Long ago he knew the forge; see leather gloves, fingers cut away? Twice a day he slogs himself to town then back.…