Category: Poetry

tonight

By Gretchen Troxell

Posted on

tonight all the versions of myself lay together on my twin size bed. one is vomiting over the metal railing, a snap of a girlfriend kissing someone else playing on repeat in their palm. one listens to our dad’s hand-curated phoebe bridgers playlist. one can’t stop eating, and one can’t eat at all, and one is somewhere in-between. one calls a friend about social studies. one calls a friend about ap history. one calls a friend and asks if they should switch their major to creative writing and five minutes later ends the call. one texts their brother. one hates their brother. one decides they don’t really mind their brother all that much. one hates their brother and curses him to hell. one is shopping on etsy for birthday gifts for their brother.…

...continue reading

Falling Down

By Patrick Swaney

Posted on

“I’m going to let you in on a secret,” the very, very old man said as he sat down across from me on the mid-day bus. “I remain balanced,” he said, “by wearing an equal number of rings on each hand.” He paused to let this information sink in. Then unsheathed his hands from his jacket pockets and, leaning in, rested them on my knees. I could only assume there were fingers underneath the mass of jewelry. “Go ahead and count them,” he said, “exactly the same number on each hand.” He was uncomfortably close to me, but his breath smelled like cough drops, which was somehow reassuring. “Go ahead.” He nodded at his hands that stayed heavy on my knees. The bus rattled on, over potholes around fast corners, and the very, very old man sat perfectly still.…

...continue reading

Horses in the City

By Dylan Tran

Posted on

I see glittered carriages sprinkled through Central Park
being pulled by horses that remind me of the Midwest,
not the steroid-juiced, blender-bred racetrack specimens,
not the ponies that granddaughters of Fortune 500 CEOs
have grown out of, but something in between

Hell’s Kitchen and Times Square
in an alley repurposed as a stable
I can smell before I can see,
a single AC unit
jutting out the only window,
a stallion with his sun-stuffed
snout pressed against the cool air,
legs stomping in the mildest satisfaction

interrupted by the stablemen
who guide it back into a steamy prison,
and I hear my friend complain,
“They aren’t supposed to live like that,”
and only then do I consider
these obvious snippets of suffering.

– Dylan Tran

...continue reading

Shadows

By Patrick Swaney

Posted on

Because the instructions said a dark cool place with absolutely no sunlight and because the boy and girl were young enough to believe in shadows, they buried the seeds in a shoebox and the shoebox beneath the basement stairs of her parents’ house. Because the instructions said uninterrupted and six to eight weeks and because the boy and girl were young, they soon forgot about the shoebox and the two seeds planted inside and went about growing up. For years the girl grew up pretty. The boy grew up fast and mean and tired of the girl for a time, as boys sometimes do. The girl’s parents were already grown up, so they grew old and grew out of the girl’s childhood home. The boy would remember the girl sadly.…

...continue reading

Folded World

By Terry Donohue

Posted on

The paper is from an outdated Atlas that an elder in my community gave me. She was a schoolteacher during her working life and the wife of a prominent Bay Area artist. She called regularly and asked me to visit her. While going through things she would pull out paper ephemera she thought I could use in my art. Despite my being a real estate agent and Notary Public, she regarded me as an artist.

She remained independent until her passing just this past week. I planned on visiting and showing her this picture. Then her son texted saying she passed peacefully.

As far as using the pages of an Atlas as origami paper, these thoughts were sparked:

It’s interesting to cut the squares out of large pages of an Atlas and then fold them.…

...continue reading

countdown

By Terry Miller

Posted on

“Intimacy unhinged, unpaddocked me.” – Diane Seuss

I am like Roethke’s bulb in a florist’s root cellar
rotting and extending sprout simultaneously,
searching for light with only a few minutes in my pocket.
They say Susan Boulet’s painting, Playing with the North Wind,
is her goodbye to the world—death and beauty laced together
in a blue bundle as though they are not different from each other.
This countdown nonsense is maddening, little indicators
flashing on as the body wears down—walking slower
to the mailbox to retrieve advertisements for things
I don’t need—where’s enlightenment—where’s the euphoria
of climax—that warm endorphin wave—rush of hush
and open-mouth kisses—all gone now—even memories
abandon me—wave goodbye as they lift above the frozen horizon
in Boulet’s painting—a fine faded star in the west.…

...continue reading

Roots

By Philip Wexler

Posted on

“Their pallid, subterranean ways,”
the chapter in the botany book begins,
“make them incomprehensible.”
It continues, though, by expounding
on the contrary, the common
sensibleness of their jobs – to anchor
the plant in soil, absorb water
and minerals, store food.  The narrative
continues with more technical matters,
never to follow up on the enigmatic
opening line.  Or maybe the author,
a many-degreed botanist, was suggesting
an alternate realm of meaning, or lack
thereof, divorced from roots’ habitual work.
But it struck a chord with me, for how
can we but be in the dark about roots
in the earth, burrowing, spreading? 
Deep or shallow, they are too deep for us
to follow where they lead.  There is no sense
seeking full disclosure, for what replies
they grudgingly may offer would bear little
resemblance, at bottom, to the unrevealable
truth, no matter our bootless digging.…

...continue reading