By Sarah-Kathryn Bryan
Posted on
Sleep like it’s all beginning.
Let your body in.
Think of her fingers.
Pace your insides.
Sit under the tree.
Flicker like the end
of a chrysanthemum
firework. Climb that tetanus
nightmare playground equipment.
Laugh at the pigwolves. Laugh
at the elfhorses. Look
at me. Please remember.
Let the silence pass through.
Smell the woods, keep
Quiet sleep.
By Jessica Mehta
Posted on
For a year he cut the lawn, and I never
knew his last name. I had to ask
the neighbor in the yellow
house after he vanished, her roses
dormant witnesses in the dark. When I’d tried
in terrible Spanish to explain where to plant the lavender,
my macete stumbled out machete
and he’d laughed behind black
cheap glasses, said, Police, bad,
they don’t like it. Words fall out
clumsy, twisted, and his surname—
we only cared when he’d gone. Then,
it was knocks on doors, furtive
asks in the night. For a week I watched
the online detainee locator site,
made calls that never came back.
The neighbor patrolled his church, carried
back stories of an avocado orchard
outside Tancítaro,unravelling
acres of drug cartels with fuerte-slick lips
where his father-in-law was murdered
last month.…
...continue reading
By Sandra Kolankiewicz
Posted on
First we’re asked if we want to change tables,
a free upgrade, the offer innocent
enough except we will find no Reward
Program exists. I don’t have to tell you
how many names I heard but remember
not one, instead recall the crow cocking
its head to look down at me from the dog
wood branch on the tree lawn, unusual
to see them perched so low unless they have
a reason, so I couldn’t listen, don’t
remember a word except the end was
the same, love just what some people feed on
before sending it away all confused
and feeling guilty for talking, thirst more
likely to keep you where you’re wanted than
a seat with a good view will make you move.
By Jeanna Paden
Posted on
85 degrees and dozing from the cough syrup
evening, too cool for the end of summer in the south
only one of us complains
where do we go from here
but back to where we always go?
the comfortable and the comforting
maybe it’s not so bad or the end
we’re here listening to frog songs
you can call mourning or jubilee
it doesn’t matter if you don’t speak the language
you’re lost in the pull of leaving light
maybe I’m just high from the rising tent of sleep
I tend to like endings
that hand over peace wrapped in swaddling
and ask me to walk gently
for as clumsy as I am
I do fall like feathers when I want to
I want to go gently
the sun, warm breeze
evening, 85 degrees
By Susan Leary
Posted on
And there appeared a great wonder in heaven;
a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet,
and upon her head a crown of twelve stars.
–Revelation, 12:1
It is but an assumption—Mary, in readying herself to
die, began to cradle the earth in her feet. Remedy for
flesh and bone as fragrant as the blooms that dared to
endure in August. As in the third hour—but all the time,
more endured than imagined: white poppy, hyacinth,
dandelion. That Mary forgot not the pink of her finger
and thumb once able to fathom thorns into roses for
plucking. Stars from within the splintering of the cross.
What better to impart unto paradise but the attendance
of her eyes? The eternalness of dirt on her tongue?…
...continue reading
By John Greiner
Posted on
The bearded lady
at the freak show
Coney Island
never got your
pharaoh fame
and now that
Koko the Killer Clown is dead
the freak show is not
worth the $5 admission
there is no guide
and jester left
to give meaning
to the front house receipts
…………queen/king
…………this is
…………a revolutionary age
of transgressive days
where from the top
of the Wonder Wheel
you can see
…………the Nile
and the green valleys
By Cameron Morse
Posted on
Elephant grass turns auburn in the wholesome cold
of October one. The month he’s due,
I took Temodar, once upon a time. In the fable, my father
boards an airplane for China,
never to return. Back home, full-bodied cherry tomatoes
pop off the vine and my Chinese wife tosses them
to the dog. My best friends have all been dogs.
While one snatches the red gush out of dry October air,
another leaves his wife, daughter, and unborn child
to take up with his mistress in Chicago.
By now it should sound familiar.
Yet I wonder where all the birds have gone
to hunker down, why only crows are left
to laugh at us, and why is it always October, the dust
in their feathers, that brings us face-to-face
with the worst in ourselves.…
...continue reading