All night the city had spent turning itself to licorice: red black, the streets and buildings getting loose, trying on masks. At the bar, Nola’s on stage stripped down to show how gypsy hair can fall across a body not yet gone to hell from junk. A guy with a wedding ring tells me she’s […]
Issue 80
Kerrin McCadden: Say Sing
This is my one life. Say you know. Say this means many things, say snowy owl, say three feet of snow, say kestrel. My one life is here at the table, next to me. Say you know, say fine night for soup, glad to have you, how was your drive. Say there is only one […]
Ada Limón: Return to Rush and Flutter
You’re the persistent fish swimming the same surviving river, un-skinned and unhinged by a year of bad weather. Lost ones in the bones, your water damage, your rage of flood and fire and still, all along Warm Springs Road the naked ladies have the nerve to flower pink and full. A choir of constant blackbirds […]
Christina LaPrease: A Mirror, Dissolving
Someone sneezes & I remember learning to say symptom, how we grew into the hush: caught coughs in a mask, pocketed morphine in rabbit furs & practiced numbers by the show of our bones. Once, we gathered pillows for a reason of rain & bedded down in a tub, chasing dragons. A junk calm blazed […]
Siel Ju: Cleaner
Something about the noise makes me want to raze the place, build up a new world with steel lego blocks. Clean lego men who don’t sweat. All polished efficiency. A quiet chrome aligned and arranged to fit. Manual labor like pushing paper, bricks in pristine rows, power tools with firearm silencers. Birds hop in and […]
Eryn Green: This Slowly Stampeding
Teakettle on the stovetop, no more boxes we thought. The white roof’s sudden razing, the storm a hundred miles off—not bad news, bad luck. Without notice, windows won’t budge. Tiny far-fetched flickerings pass like paper from a windy deck—I’ve learned to hold a shadow in a box. By the evaporating shore, past the river, we […]