The Bookends Review

Yet another storm shivers the trees,
            reeling even the towering

sequoia. While walking the dog, I weep,
            forced by icy wind

to abandon stoicism, your plane not yet
            airborne.  Once again,       

I strip your sheets, reshelve books you never
            opened, find, on the sill,… ...continue reading

river   city   sky
spectrum  of grey
ungiving surfaces

nothing immediate
available here

suspended
between cities
someone… ...continue reading

Do you know that feeling you get
when giving up
when you don’t care for another day,
when you realize you are your childhood
no matter how much you try to smother it? 

As you wonder if anyone will care after you’ve departed
as you walk through the gate alone
in the same way you arrived. … ...continue reading

I saw him resting under a tree, my tree. Or at least everyone called it my tree since the incident. But since it was being called my tree, however spitefully, I would claim it as such. So I’d say my bit and I’d kick him out from under my tree. Then, I’d watch him lumber off and I’d take a nice nap. It was a good day for a nap too, balmy and quiet. Much like the day that ruined my life. Just thinking of it made me bristle with anger. But I called upon that to fuel my speech and I scampered on over to him. 

“I need to talk to you.” He slowly craned his neck to look up at me. He blinked his beady little eyes at me, and slowly, ever so slowly, opened his mouth.… ...continue reading

Anyone who saw me reading Things We Lost in the Fire in public must have thought I was suffering and in deep pain. Every story in Mariana Enriquez’s debut collection had me grimacing and squirming, shifting uncomfortably in my seat. But her stories are so thoroughly transporting that I lacked the self-awareness to care. I was far away in Argentina, worried about the news of the decapitated child flashing across the television screen, and the one-armed girl who went missing in a haunted house, and on a murder tour of Buenos Aires. Enriquez’s stories all center around life in Argentina, often detailing the lives of disadvantaged youth. These stories are dark and unsettling, written so beautifully that the whole experience of reading them leaves you in a macabre trance.… ...continue reading

I know the girl with the ashes in her hair,
the one with the dreams piled like logs, the one
who goes up in smoke because her daddy promised her the world
and who is gone, as fast as he came.

I know what it feels like to be those morphing feet,
those unseeding pumpkins, to return to a mouse from a stallion,

to pray and pray in someone’s locked room
that that someone, somewhere
will find you.

– Penney Knightly… ...continue reading

With a gravitational sense of exhaustion, Heather puts her machine to sleep and wheels herself back from the white desk in the grey cubical. She sits shut-eyed for a moment, feels crazed, resists an urge to slam her coffee mug through the black screen.

9:11 p.m. as her head rises above the partitions separating the other cubicles, most of which are still occupied with foreheads reflecting the shine of monitors. Maree is in the adjacent box and she doesn’t notice as Heather stares down at her. Maree’s eyes are bloodshot and her mousy hair frayed and dry from the air conditioning. Her face seems barely held together by thick makeup.

“You nearly done?” says Heather.

Maree starts a little and looks up with a horrible unchanged expression of emptiness, and then her eyes blink a few times, registering the human form.… ...continue reading