The middle school rumor was you burn more calories than you gain when you eat celery. So much attention to what was inside a lunch box then, when I longed to become buxom and nothing at once, thin as smoke from a fire right before the night wins— flickering rib-hollows, shadowed cheeks. It took me […]
Poetry
Rachael Philipps: After you left us
After you left us, I got the call Her cremains are ready, she said. The what? I said The cremains…cremated remains. She explained, testily. Like… duh. Oh, I say Her ashes. What I wanted to say – She, should never be called cremains. Of course I angry-Googled it – industry term, euphemism, first found in […]
Karl Meade: doom eager
doom eager * because one of us took a spike to the lung a minivan to the chest hit the beach with his heart to say nothing of the one whose only breath was broken water because I believe the hand, the wound, the moon is how I show you where I fell through the […]
Karl Meade: Christmas break
The earth heaves, the ice cleaves. Erosion cuts the heart from every stone, while every night I watch you drive your family past a starving glacier, turn from a truck laden with salt. You head off the head on, take the bumper to the heart, leave your family straining your lungs’ last words from the […]
Kristi Maxwell: Pray
It’s consensual—don’t worry—the garden getting fucked by rain. We had all asked for it, begged for it, prayed. And, after, again: may “grow” not be lost as a verb. The storm was an unethical doctor, sharing with us the sky’s own ephemeral x-ray. We needed to see it. We needed to project our own bones […]
Kristi Maxwell: Glance
You can put your hand on a familiar tree and say, “hello, tree,” and claim your tear as the sap of you, desperate to be identified as tree-like, seasoned, with little thought of not lasting through the year, the decade, the decades. We are not fossils—we are not still enough to become this land’s keepsakes. […]