– for Noah 1. The child holds on inside me: pink bat, drowsy possum. With quick teeth, I eat handfuls of bread and fruit the shape of my own body, pear juice like tears coats the flesh of my arms. 2. At night coyotes send up sparks of hunger and laughter from the frozen field. […]
Poetry
Daniel Donaghy: Scrapple
Chances are, you’ve had it–– maybe while you were high, with creamed chipped beef and toast, or out with relatives now long gone on a sandwich called the Junk Yard Dog: fried pork roll, fried bacon, fried scrapple and eggs on a soaked bun you couldn’t pick up. Maybe it’s not for everyone, but it’s […]
Lisabeth Burton: Sweet Feer
I eat like people who dog ear the bottom corner of pages, people in which unrequited lust accrues. Dear heavenly icebox, I’m not brawling with my nature, this is me appealing for a conversation of the body. Forgive us our engorged purple lamb chops, the final fifty pieces of pickled peach cobbler, forgive us the […]
Abraham Burickson: At the Jobsite Friday is Barbecue Day
St. Agnes shouldn’t let her girls go but she does with shrieking bells and could be they planned the wind just for Sal: why they make them skirts so short! his eyes grey and hot like the barbecue burned too long, needs coal, Charlie pours some and maybe he’s embarrassed until Sal unwraps the beef […]
Sue Song: Lessons
I. My father tears the body, lines his fingers along the fish’s cracked back fin and pulls against the head– its eyes opaque from the fry. He removes the tender middle, layered in tiers like feathers holds the meat, still wet, and asks Marie’s mother to open her mouth. II. At Sunday school, a helper-mother […]
Rumit Pancholi: Appetite
Three-quarters moon, one-quarter barn: panoramic haze of cattle bellows in a funk. Gray air trudges by like wintered cornhusk, a dark bird pecks quietly its pile of fodder on a straw hat the scarecrow refuses to wear correctly like a rebellious child. From the cornfield she emerges, the stolid, bonneted girl, a fat stray raccoon […]