If your husband never returned From a trip to buy milk Would you slip in the date He vanished While admiring A neighbor’s petunias? If they asked had you noticed A change, would you say How does one register Change on a blank slate? There were disappointments, You’d admit kicking The black tar of the […]
Poetry 76
Nellie Bridge: It’s Like Riding on a Train
The one certain thing is the destination, the human voice that sounds automated pronouncing the name of the end of the line in the local accent. You’re on the right train. The smell of the plastic seats, the same for generations. No need to be in a hurry. No need to engage the people nearby. […]
Gary Hawkins: Insomnia
In the bed she assigned to me, too narrow for tonight, taking for her own the couch on which I could just as easily stretch with a three-inch shortening of my straight and narrowed spine; the heat blowing its desert over us all night, competing all night for what little air, I turn as she […]
Richard Carr: Immovable Sleep
My neighbor walks his dog, a decrepit Scottish terrier, in the alley, very slowly, like he’s pushing a wheelchair. Only in his middle years, the man has enough dreary vitality only for this, for walking the dog. He loves only the dog. All else is lethargy. Behind our apartment building the dumpsters are always overfilled […]
Andrew McCarron: How Sunflowers Come
I watch as an ozone-gray cloud passes over John Hardeman’s easternmost meadow off Route 199 in Red Hook. The month is April and the Dutchess County sun comes and widens over soon-to-be swaths of purple loosestrife. In a dream last night the Dutchess sun boomed and in one heave it was June and June pulled […]
Roy Seeger: Hogan’s Heroes: Sgt. Shultz, Unsure of what He Knows, Considers His Work
I’ve never seen the people I work for but maybe it’s a mistake to think they’re like me. I’ve talked to everyone moving through this Stalag- prisoners, guards, locals- and their stories are mostly the same: Boy finds girl, boy loses girl to the war and so on. It’s heartbreaking really, how each story can’t […]