You will tell her it’s dirty the pigeon she chases her tiny hands open through the park Not a mom I don’t know what makes one freeze or flee pull the lips back to bare teeth I only know that I love the white ones brushed with shades of brown of pink so like doves […]
Issue 68
Kathy Graber: Topography: Pineland
You can always get a National Geographic back issue at the county library for a dime. What you want though are the maps, the way they marry their words to the world— because mostly we just come to go by going. I took 347 for weeks before I knew it had a number. I thought […]
Leonard Gontarek: Home
You are crying for something in the past. Fair enough. Your mother is dead here. A praying mantis eats through a leaf. They’ve changed over the streetlights to the safer, apricot-hazed ones. Bang your fist on my heart if you understand. Raunchy, whispering ghost, one streetlight on earth, out. The maples & moving clouds go […]
Sally Dawidoff: Self-Portrait Before An Open Window
A bee nearly killed me. Fourteen years of shots I got! It’s something special about me, my allergies: Peppermint. Bees. Silk. The odd flower. . . The negligee leapt from the ledge. The bouquet came to grief beside the recycling. So much you gave me I couldn’t use. “‘Special’?” You were amused. Naked, sneezing, rubbing […]
Sally Dawidoff: Self-Portrait Astride A Zamboni ®
The beer’s flowing, and, high in the driver’s seat of an ice resurfacing machine, I’m tipsy in tea-length chiffon. I’m tired of being good. I shall embark on a pattern of mild infractions. I shall give out my sought-after phone number— perhaps to that strapping groomsman I spied from the car as the wedding party […]
Susan Briante: UNQUIET
Vertex of the Chrysler Building, pray for me; linemen, bartenders, muses, pray for me; crow covered highway, sing for me; over the bridge of a Washburn 6-string, lay me; crazed molecule! terse atom! play for me; with the moans of forklifts, speak for me; in satin, sable, calico, adorn me; squat propane containers of Bayonne, […]