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...
This is red rock sensibility: Laura picks feathers
out of her hair and whispers, He loves me. He loves me
not. Too much time is spent twisting spanners – a clock
can be wound and rewound, but...
Harry Newman Denver, NY for that first year she told me she could only paint with black broad strokes more like sketching she saw only in outline an empty world of edges white showing through...
Colleen Abel The word deviant. A lovely, leering word, its two keening e sounds and the snap shut of its final syllable. You would never guess this body harbors such linguistic loveliness....
Nikki Reklitis First Things First He will walk towards you in a sky-blue shirt and you will know it’s him. His eyes will be wide and deep and beautiful. You will walk together past Mooney’s Bay,...
Anna Krem My mother stands at the mirror in the bathroom of our old house, holding a cheap plastic palette of makeup she bought on clearance a year ago. She swabs at a square with the stubby black...
Bill Moran 1. Oh yeah well my Grandpaw says, hey, hey my Pawpaw says: “When god spoke us into existence, he slurred and forgot his words. Wanted to say ‘bright’ but said ‘bone’ and here we...
Konstantin Kulakov I. Metrorail. A spent, amber streetlight. There, a deer tearing at warm grass— a nauseous-sweet mist rising as from a Bangladeshi garden. Tomorrow, the sun will climb over...
Gillian Cummings You were about to float away so they taught you not to. Soft-crofted into quiet they come, finely fretted in frocks of spook light—winged ones they bring, goldfinch, marlin,...
Nancy Hewitt There’s a crack in everything – that’s how the light gets in. – Leonard Cohen A warm front’s arriving, blasts of sun knifing their way through thunderous...
