Tag: poetry
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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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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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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.…