when my mom and dad were doing the young-married-person thing my aunt was always single so she babysat she gave me cheerios and I ate while she had her breakfast cigarette and afterward we took walks and I pointed out all the volunteers which is what my dad told me you call a plant you […]
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Christine Hamm: Late
I’ll tell them you were here, you say. I notice your eyes are different shapes – one like a pigeon, one like a fork. There’s movement in the kitchen: shadows, laughter. Nothing fits right, my shoes or tongue. I can see the crayon portrait of you hanging framed in the hallway behind you. I made […]
Lynn Fanok: Nowosiόłki
Is this the place where you milked cows? Fed horses? Is this the place (you told me, but shouldn’t have), where your mutt Hammer killed your chickens, so you hung him from a tree then whimpered like a dog? Is this the place where they came and took your chickens, took your goats, took your […]
Christina Cook: Every Ounce of Its Corpse Unstable
Gas giants ghost through the universe of my son’s reflector telescope. In its dime-sized mirror, he watches their state of being go from gas to liquid to something solid as the muskrat the owl comes up from the marsh with, squirming is its natural reaction to pain, its body’s knowledge that it will die in […]
Christina Cook: Doing the Dishes
I beget the continental drift of dish soap down the drain, tectonic shift of plates, planetary in the sense of belonging as everything belongs to the earth’s innermost sodden crust. Suds assemble into large masses of land. Hemispheres appear to rise up from the rinds of the evening meal. The planet implodes in the garbage […]
Patrick Boyle: Going Away Party
Max stands in the doorway with a bottle of whiskey. He is drunk and I am getting there. I follow the leader, the liter disappears as we play, as our throats pull fast shots. He deploys to Iraq in a few days, the inevitable soldier’s going. We’re drunk. We keep drinking. We drink drunk and […]