Soot blossoms: nature works in fits and starts wedged in here between two coursing interstates, gray as developers’ photographs. By the creek, rats drink the rainbow runoff of suburban waste, scatter at my flashlight whenever I come back evenings to think, sit beneath this bone-cold chimney standing houseless among bankrupt wrecks: a bulldozer rusted in […]
Contributors 68
Simon Perchik: 3 Poems
* New Jersey’s oldest abandoned iron mine —even this sprout sacrificed, its only leaf as if inside some small cage the last summer left turning yellow, fell —I listen for feathers for this paper unfolding almost a flower —the Times reports canaries gagging by the millions :trees disappearing in black love notes in myself, in […]
Gregory Pardlo: Atlantic City Sunday Morning
Plow-piled snow shrouded in shadow from the abbreviating sun, snow frosted with the exhaust of tour buses. Pigeons shift in congress. Sun glints windshields & chrome like cotton blooms in the monitors. Surveillance here is catholic. From cornices cameras oscillate like raven-heads nestled along palisades. Cameras mind entrances, pedestrians, traffic, the landscape from land’s end […]
Carole Simmons: Oles Parallel Universes
for Sue, in Florence I had to laugh when the kids on the Ponte Vecchio overlooking the Arno pointed and yelled, pronounced in three languages RAT and you turned to me, insisting it must be an otter. Me a New York kid who’d perched on the wall in Astoria Park looking down at rocks edging […]
Carole Simmons: Oles A Fine Example
The late cinquecento Venetian bride displayed upon a ledge beside their bed this marriage goblet: emerald glass, enamel red and blue, the rim gold granules; gilt the fluted base, the portrait bride’s curls and bodice trim, whose arc two strands of pearls repeat—gems La Serenissima forbade loose women. The bride’s bouquet a certain lily, her […]
Carley Moore: Turning In
for Matt She says he spent a life contemplating white. I hear this about yellow too—the white in yellow is even more difficult. I like streets that cross into one another. This might be a way of making a mountain. I have only one stairway to climb down from. The map of Queens does not […]