Dear sociologists, here at dazed lute press we’ve been conducting field experiments into your private thoughts. One faction wonders whether or not you wonder must one imagine oneself beneath the desk holding particular crayons or is it best to stare at as many crudely drawn bus stops apples and clarinets as can across the land […]
Contributors 75
Susan B.A. Somers-Willett: Thaw and the Beginning of Everything
The monk crosses the garden’s grassy islands of ice balancing a vaporing cup of tea on a bone saucer. He is singing a matin in the plot. He fingers the toughened peas in his pocket. Their thin brittle coats diminish, evaporating in his hands like onion skin or flakes of golden paper. They have been […]
Afaa M. Weaver: Lucille Clifton, Legends
for Fred and Rita at AWP Baltimore Conference, 2003 I The hotel room needs more space, the heart another heart, so the pieces of the wall come apart, panel by panel, the workers walking them down into a mysterious hole. Rita and I wonder where do walls go. They walk them in the drone way […]
Peter Stillman: Making Use of Odds and Ends
More often and for periods as long as… oh, the life of an eraser, say, a bar of hotel soap, I’ve used up nights in search of why I use up nights this way— that is, compiling reasons for not sneaking out on Winthrop’s pond and bouncing on the rotten ice til I fall through. […]
John Parras: New Milford
When I go to borrow the electric hand- saw, my uncertain neighbor alludes to Hamlet’s friend Horatio —something about sparrows falling and his wife steps out as the metal screen door flashes white and it’s spring, I’ve just got my hair cut by a fleet-fingered barber smelling of lavender and everyone in Jersey is busy […]
John Parras: Sky
The heart is a knot dark in pine. My fingertips are stained pecan. The backs of my hands itch. There is nothing worth bombing. Sawdust powders my clothes, rises aloft, pixie dust in staid suburbia. We spent the whole day cleaning the garage. From here I can smell Afghanistan. What good are the old forms? […]