When I circle God with prayers like the blades we’ve learned to make, I raise a voice shaped into words. Old stories say a letter from hell, opened with no care for seams, straight lines, or soul, gave Solingen the forge centuries ago. From this city of blades where my great- grandfather learned to beat […]
Poetry 84
Amy MacLennan: Between Two Ranges
It’s where you think you’ll stop— a smallish town. Houses with porches that seem like promise. The two of you will cruise through in an afternoon, and the café will serve coffee sweet with hot milk. The chairs feel familiar, the tables impossibly smooth. Floors will creak like home. When you walk back to the […]
Reagan Lothes: She Loses Her Face
It wasn’t sudden, the way one loses car keys or misplaces the oregano on the rack. It wasn’t there one day and then gone. She first noticed it loosening, a slight slackening around the mouth, as she sketched floor plans. She was young, then. When he left her, she felt her eyes go. Poring over […]
Paul Lisicky: Too Late for a Good Wink
The sky shat snow some more, and the coffee shop’s a colloquy of the damaged, the alcoholically damaged, the neurologically damaged, and in comes Choo Choo, the fat assed wonder, to wipe off his tiny spectacular feet. Oral B.’s tugging at the waistband of the loveliest sweatpants this side of the Great Lakes, and what? […]
Russell Jaffe: You and I are Cooled magma Idols They Call Lava Rock
Honey, you rise like an ancient day with a glyph smile. I sacrifice myself in driving to work, cutting ashes of the grey November highway and the morning news cannot replicate that tone. Honey, I held my fist up and told you I had a mouth of gold, but behind the loincloth of a day […]
David Greenslade: Shields
These little guys are the faces of a Trojan virus. Technology defecates and the stink makes even Leviathan monsters hide their heads and cough. Swarms of little backsides drop these bits of blotting paper all over the place and when the wind picks up they blow into the nostrils of all sorts of party animals […]