“My brother is dying,” my mother tells me over the phone, her voice spilling down the line, a thin stream of water over the lip of a dam. My mother says the word dying like it’s a question. As...
“how liminally can the lyric exist,” I asked the wilderness
& the wilderness just blinked. so I exited, stage-left, & offered
only my agreeing with green: explosions of caricature
I...
A mouth knows shapes for certain dying.
Says lunulas grey-bluing
like whites unseparated on
laundry day.
Murmurs knees
violaceous mottling, plum over
stone of cartilage and bone....
I reconsider the sea. How uncomfortable it makes me
that water might decide what breathes & doesn't
breathe. How the shape of
water hides its cruelty. Unleashed,...
and bandy-legged, I passed time
among hills and hay, swam in dirty
pools. The summer skies were green-
eyed, the color of witches and grassy
cow pies. I was greedy for...
Jacqueline Doyle Manka curled up on her white linen couch with a glass of Pinot Noir and opened the new New Yorker to the fiction page. On the left there was an illustration of a snowy...
The word “benign” has several meanings. It can mean kindly or harmless. Or gentle – which is nice. I thought it also meant “sitting around doing nothing,” but this incorrect.
If you are...
I was several blocks away, kicking a soccer ball against a cinder block wall. In the hospital that evening I stood alone in the fluorescent hall. I didn't believe a bit of it. Was Gawk in the room...
Do not make bones at me // I are soonly calcified // I are knowing
of death and of burial // making your spells // into mush words
remember how to incant this // I are not black in my father's...
