It’s time to be alone, solitary As light upon the snow; Snow comes down to warn me Whitman is dead, And the wounded boys lie uncared for on hospital cots; Snow reminds me how much it costs To blow up a city, and how Einstein longed For a reasonable god. Icicles hang From the drainpipe. […]
Issue 64
Christopher Connelly: Orpheus
He was a god, he didn’t need Eurydice. It doesn’t matter that the lavender honey of his too-perfect love hardened, or that he saw the sun from pure darkness. But don’t hate Orpheus, praise him for the space that his failure left between love and the world. That singing means nothing without death is the […]
Grant Clauser: The Taxidermist’s Daughter
The workshop smells of chemicals and wood, a hint of fur and the sound of wild running through tall grass. I watch him peel the skin from deer, polish bear claws and fix the flaws of careless shots in the body of a running fox. But best I like to touch the birds, the pheasant […]
Bruce Bond: The O at the End of the World
Tonight I take refuge in the Tibetan Book of Living and Dying and, if only for the moment, enter the curious skin of someone I never was or could be. I too want to believe, to imagine, as believers do, every face at birth is a rock on fire, falling earthward. I want to think […]
Eric Birkholz: Dreaming the Last Days
Our umbrellas withered like sugar in the light snow, and the avenue glittered, splintering at the Flatiron and curtained any further north. Manhattan was another prefecture of Honshu, redrawn by the sober hand of Hiroshige, the light a mere hunger for light. It was the humbled gray Apple of January when the storms root and […]
Wendy Barker: Through
layers of rock the softer dirt collects, fountains with moist leaves of mint, scilla, purple hyacinth, and primula. * Boundaries, margins, hedgerows. Maintaining separate fields. But the leaves, branches, white hair of roots press beyond fences. * The clouds have woven countries. Rain falls here and somewhere else you might be moving, your feet touching […]