No one is safe, not even from worms, like the one in my mozzarella sandwich. The worm in our relationship, come alive. A giant black bean until I noticed it blindly squirming, covered with oil from the pesto, a little tomato. Ribbed like my favorite shirt, but blessed with animated life. I looked again – […]
Issue 76
Thomas Devaney: Sonnet
You know all those sonnets the ones where I said, “I love you,” well This time, I mean it, this time I’m talking about Your curly hair soaked black from October’s frozen rain. You reading Milton and eating a BLT. Our up-front lies about being vegetarians, (Milton’s, “I can not praise a cloistered virtue”). More […]
Veronica Castrillón: Some Abundance
If I could carve out my own heart, I think I’d survive it. What I am now, something too close to involuntary. It does not admit me, doesn’t yield to release its secrets. It fastened itself to my self. I have a mane, my nostrils flare. Some kind of remainder: But I am the human […]
Keetje Kuipers: Restlessness
Another afternoon. The mail, a pile of credit card offers I rip in two and dump in the bin. As a child, I stood at the edge of Lake Michigan and imagined a future as wide as those shores. Now, I drive my old station wagon across town to my best friend’s house where there […]
Michael Broder: Priamel
You can’t really I don’t think write it today the kind of poem Sappho wrote six hundred years before Christ where you surprise the world saying not an army is it on horseback or of foot soldiers or a fleet of sailing ships that on the black earth is the most beautiful thing but rather […]
James Allen Hall: Portrait of my Mother as Rosemary Woodhouse
My mother dreams she’s adrift on the Adriatic Sea. Naked men and women lounge all around her. Blue waves slap against her thigh and stones fall from unspeakable cliffs. I am dropped into her, boulder after boulder of me until I am safely drowned inside her. In the morning, Manhattan never looked so beautiful. “I […]