My mother plants snow peas behind the garage. She works around the sink hole that takes dry leaves and garbage all summer. In her memory, I am an almost abortion. She plants marigolds with the tomatoes, symbiotic bright suns bursting between the rows. Sometimes she knows, love abounding, sometimes she overlooks an entire season’s glut, […]
Poetry 93
Sarah Sarai: Anyway
I was so happy when Mickey Rooney showed up in The Black Stallion, 1978. It had been awhile and there he was with his hello, folks! face gone serious, still warm and visually, believably wise. Clarence Muse drove a horse and wagon. Pauline Kael, the film critic, wrote that being black, Clarence Muse was a […]
Ariane Sandford: Two Swans
Two swans glide across dark water A few feet above the body of a drowned boy. Police will drag the lake next week. Now Lancelot and Elaine draw circles with webbed feet. A few feet above the body of a drowned boy, The swans keep other secrets, too. Lancelot and Elaine draw circles with webbed […]
T.J. Sandella: Abracadabra
Think of Harry Houdini in a straitjacket suspended over a busy city street, or think of him clawing at his throat in a Chinese Water Torture Cell. He wanted to be an actor, you know, and all of those performances he perfected were only ever meant to be a stepping-stone to the silver screen. Did […]
Tiana Pyer-Pereira: The end of the Ice Age
was pretty muddy, actually though nobody likes to talk about it No one will mention how the earth wept for days in smudged rills draining ropey fluvial rivulets to pool bewildered beneath our feet they left a negative impression of where the glacier had strayed, drifting absent-minded as a one-night stand who waits in your […]
Alexandria Peary: How to Become a Writer in 12 Easy Steps
(After Michael Earl Craig) A standard street lamp on my desk lights a bench. All of the buildings on the shelves are quiet and dark and lean into one another, sleep standing up, and not a soul comes to sit on the bench the length of a No. 2 pencil, not one of the wind-up […]