I. Summer Walking across a golf course at night, I stop to pick up a tee, a thin white funnel planted in the grass. Or perhaps the smallest ear trumpet ever made, I can hear the nervous laughter of teenagers drinking on the seventh green, and I can hear the silence ten years ago, when […]
Contributors 64
Candace McClelland: After the Sirens
Trace me with chalk So I know where I end And where the asphalt Begins. Draw around My edges, closely, in white. Show where I’m small and Where I’m not. On your crisp sheets, Touch me with fingers Rough and dry around My ankles, past my hips, Across my wrists so I know they exist. […]
Michael Hudson: Me and You in The Guinness Book of World Records
While you held your breath the longest and fell without a parachute the farthest, a distant church bell dragged its broken foot across our last Sunday morning together. And all through breakfast, the Heaviest Man in the World scraped his eggy fork across a greasy plate, making a sound like the oldest documented parrot (bald, […]
Kim Horner: Smoke
is always second-hand. Always a distant spiral, a curling sign. Even if we breathe it, we keep only vestiges, carbon particles freed from wood or leaves, spinning into our ignorant lungs. My grandfather, an acre away, stirred a black pot spidered over an open fire, and no one can tell me what he mixed or […]
Michael Graber
I. A Primer on Quilting an Adulterous Scene Weave the high tones of conversation into a quilt, still threadbare where the wind has taken your loose hair. The silence is too much not to mention. Just sew what is hard to say— the tilted face of wild children, our frozen spouses, lonely as dying stars […]
Martin Galvin: The Silence of Eggs
He never told anyone at the monastery How he talked to the chickens as he took The warm eggs from under them, How he forgave their beaks, their sharp Reminders of the privileges of motherhood. He never even told the tree he came to For its murmuring shade to wipe his brow Of the Iowa […]