I have kept you Ko Un for days longer than the iron bound librarian allows you are a poet of poets because magpies sleep on your shoulders through winter and even a millet shortage uprising cannot awaken them. You write with the ink of your veins about travelers you’ve met on old village […]
Poetry 92
Alyssa Carver: Chemistry
It doesn’t matter what they call it. The first image was of something like squid in a cloudy aquarium, ink swirling, a sinking, murky poison. But the brain is nothing like a fish tank; I know this. It is made up of wrinkles, rolled tight like new pantyhose. Layered like an onion’s pearly sheath; pink […]
Keverlee Burchett: Goodwill Inventory
This time when you come you’re not a thing lost, not broken or recently fixed— you don’t break or fix me. Now you’re harmless. Now, you’re a glove-boxed ice scraper in south Georgia, a post hole digger, birdseed scattered to a city of squirrels. Now, when you appear out of nowhere […]
Shevaun Brannigan: When the World Ends
there won’t be newspapers with letters to the editor objecting to how the city council handled the crisis. No TVs to turn on. The hand-cranked radios too hot to handle, but then we won’t have hands. No psychologists to diagnose Post-Traumatic Death Disorder, no couches to lie back on as a glistening orb of light. […]
Lisa Andrews: Mother Love Song
Watch me, I am the living snake that sheds its skin. Watch this emerald sheath turn to grass. I go on forever. I am the green flash, quick as summer lightening. I am that fast. I am the cobra. Kiss me and your village will be saved. I am the boa constrictor that hangs in […]