The dogs were barking, I was trying to get home a new way, and I really had to pee. I stopped into a happening steak house, and asked where the bathroom was. “Miss,” I said, “where is the bathroom?” She told me the way to get there, and two guys asked me if I was […]
Issue 71
John Pursley: Alma Natura
The reflections of coniferous trees patterning & unpatterning themselves Like consummate intermediaries caught in the pastiche Of something other. The highway hums Its mournful tunes. TV towers buzz & blink red eyes And the river— blinks back. A man on the radio says nature is getting smarter—has learned to fashion itself differently. Things have changed, […]
Ricardo Pau-Llosa: WALKING PAST A NEW FIVE-STORY PARKING GARAGE
Clean as meat cut by a cleaver, the concrete edifice sponges up the halogen beams. The polite lamps hide in beds of river-washed stones and beneath the flowering shrubs. Pinned-tie neat and scrubbed, the building is too new to be noticed, though it could hangar a couple of Parthenons or that Roman shell ablaze in […]
Chuck Kruger: An Ontological Answer
Why am I standing here with my back to the wind watching the rafters be raised? Me of the wobbly legs. Me of the valium eyes. I’m maybe good to carry nails, fetch the four-foot level, to and fro, to and fro. Little dinky things. Why am I standing anywhere watching anyone work? A year […]
Chuck Kruger: Song of Solemn Solomon’s Wife
I smell the sea between your legs, smell a harbor where one slow soft-chugging skiff unloads the salmon of the night. An indistinct hip-booted man anoints the fishing gear with oil and spreads his salt-caked nets upon the pier. My dear my tongue begins to taste your waters and I smell us together, smell the […]
James Hoch: “Shift”
It’s possible Whitman meant the sudden movement of the universe, more commonly used to describe the phenomenon of flux as when a shift in a single cell’s division alters pupa and the suddenly bright alarm of a butterfly anoints the end of a branch. Or perhaps it was reflecting life’s stasis, the material of the […]