You are four years
old. Your father hands you a brick. He says, “This is lighter
than it feels.”
You are in a garage. The walls are cluttered with newspaper – photos of aftermaths. Rusted tools hang from the ceiling. The
concrete floor is splattered with grease. Your father grunts against a band
saw. Sawdust floats into your breath.
You drop the brick while you are testing its lightness. You stare
at the blood. You stare at your separation. Your toenail ripped off. The flesh
underneath is hot pink. You can’t remember if you cried.
Your father begins sanding wood.
– Heather Warren…
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here, in a skinny creek
between dilapidated banks cleaved
and dark with clay, root-veins, your feet go numb; upwards,
his eyes grow bright in sky’s grotesque light—
your shoulders, cold, glow;
come to know his quivering palms, and then
his tongue is lapping into yours, summoning splash
and slap of sauntering stream
who teaches boys the vocabulary of body
anyway? cornea, cervix, thigh, but in truth
you too have unnamed yourself: aphasic
and dazed, goose-bumped beneath
sky unzipping, sky kissing mountaintops, (smothering
itself in their teeth,) and still
a boy’s eyes and hands down and up on you
his blood-pink lips whispering commanded
praise: stretch, spread, slip, a creek
turning surely to ice around feet
– Emma Karnes
Author’s Note: “make-out creek” seeks to address the anxieties, thrills, and confusions of girls’ early sexual experiences.…
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Deep in the house
in the pit of the house
where the concrete sweats
there is a stain
and a leak so slow
it tastes of the dust
that it gleans in the rising—
It clings to us
a humid grit
that will stick
to the skin
a word lodged in
a throat
a secret shame.…
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when you came home that afternoon
they did not let me see you immediately.
i guess because you may have been covered
in ash, fear
fragments, blood that did not belong to you
but that is only a guess. the face you wore
was not unlike your usual but every corner
was turned down and all the lines in your skin
seemed more like canyons than cracks.
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Let go of the willing captives. The reborn followers.
Even the cruelest deserve to know you don’t exist.
Bring forth the freedom made by your absence.
Make a promise and keep it. Take this cup of truth
and drink from it. Swish this salt of surrender inside
your mouth. Multiply skeptics far and wide. Flood
newfound wisdom across these deserts
of prayer. Oh, Lord, like a good hero, ride your horse
into that sunset and never turn back.
– Aidan Chafe
Author’s Note: “Prayer in the Age of Unreason” came about because of my current obsession with Judeo-Christian mythology. I was reading poetry from Jericho Brown and Katie Ford, as well as non-fiction and essays from Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris. The combination became a tonic for me writing about religion.…
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I walked to the foot of a clock tower. It was the end
of a ghost town, light filtering through dull windows,
birds turning their heads from their makeshift roosts.
A woman in a trench coat hurried to the top of the stairs,
hush, hush, her footsteps, the rain outside, a winter storm.
The blue made the birds seem breakable, the clock still—
everything else was darkness, not a click but a shudder,
which served as an explanation that even the perceptible
needs to be reminded of itself. The woman might have said
come with me, but I couldn’t tell. Not that I would have known
what to say. Sometimes my eyes are more
clever than a kaleidoscope, like a voice at the top of a stairwell
which says don’t you remember what could’ve been?…
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I wailed at the cruelty
when the bi-planes felled him.
Learning then that man, malarial man,
buzzing round the wonder of the great ape like mosquitoes,
would kill us all.
I was Faye, entombed in the leathery digits of Kong,
a font of youth and tears and love, and I was also Kong,
the humanity in his gentled placid eyes when he clutches her,
his brackish rage; part righteous part misguided. …
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