“Your father had an accident there: he was put in a pie by Mrs. McGregor.” –The Tale of Peter Cottontail, Beatrix Potter My endeavor is an assemblage of tissue, bone, and nerve whose code is to lift me up. The engine of music, an enterprise of cells, a corporation of one. Even though she’s seen […]
Contributors 81
Britton Shurley: A Plot Against Robots (after Wallace Stevens)
First Girl When I hear their metal boots clacking through the garden, trampling down the daffodils, I will dance by this patch of violets; I will call down hours of rain. Their rusty knees should halt them. Second Girl I will set the herbs ablaze— the lemon thyme, the chocolate mint, the blooming pineapple sage. […]
Dante Micheaux: Mary at the Torture
Everyone was out that day, for a show. Sure, it was sad for people who knew him but she was his mother, slinking about the rabble in that dark halug, veiling her face with a headscarf—as if no one noticed her. Some say it served her right, letting her son run about the countryside the […]
Ada Limón: The Story of the Pencil
He takes the pencil out of his shirt pocket and gives it to her. It turns into a dragonfly and then into her only reason to live. She is poor and carries the dragonfly-pencil in her apron and writes him notes all day on paper towels. In the night, when everyone else is sleeping, her […]
Jona Colson: Mother, Rest
I, too, felt anxious, and snared— so when I left the house I didn’t wave goodbye, didn’t look you in the eye. I knew I would not come back to that room, that sound of stars crashing against the window mesh, that color of loss sword-flashing silver in the dark hall. I couldn’t take you […]
Jene Beardsley: Sniper
The shots come from somewhere overhead– Small-caliber raindrops That pick off one by one the yellow leaves Crowding the black maple.