I was chiquita
cuando my parents died.
We must have been rico.
Poetry 85
Vandana Khanna: After Developing
At first, simple— me next to the Venus with no arms, you twisting my torso for the photo so I’m an imitation, a crooked goddess. Arms pinned behind me like gnarled vines grown thick by the side of a country road, my hands a clasp of tangled root. We wandered the city, impersonating: at the […]
Tom Lake: Shooting the Last Buffalo
Sweaty, and panting, and raucous, quick to jibe, the crowd teems, breaks apart, and amasses again. Two farmers, brothers and neighbors, then five, then nine. Word spills to cousins of assorted degree, black-eyed wives. Some run ahead with the ribby hounds. Some bring scrapers, crocks, knives, jars, and bags, that they might catch every part: hide, organ, sinew, […]
Roy Scranton: ‘And nevermore shall we turn back to 7-11’
And nevermore shall we turn back to the 7-11, to the slow river bridged by Market and the train trestle, to WinCo’s late-night lot, to Denny’s or Lancaster Mall, to violet-gold clouds blazing god-caught above the prison. What roots, what blood, what fields plant me in the turning seasons now in this nostalgia, now as […]
Raphael Allison: Koi
To the white and orange koi and the long, gold god who nipped from the top of my neighbor’s unlikely pond her last mouthful of nutritive scum, goodbye until your fatty doubles are happily dumped up to their weird whiskers into your empty house. I watched you last summer turn and turn and turn, then […]
Raphael Allison: Immigrant Song
The land was nothing. Just fields of blank ice and trees dying, crows hooting and tumbling over the granite of our disbelief. For those who didn’t leave quarter, cold whippings. For those who did, whipping cold and icy boots, flamed skin, hollows of hunger that plunged whale-deep. Appetite’s animal snarl, ribs prowing hard through seas […]