While other girls were testing the firm peach of their bodies against Apollo’s golden shield, I was looking for ways to tear out of mine like a wetsuit. To swim away, bold and magenta fish far beyond the Pharaoh’s hook of my father’s pain, the hollow floor of the boat where he waited like a […]
Poetry 93
Cynthia Dewi Oka: From a Talisman’s Point of View
All the world is kindling, a brain ticking towards the consummate light, black light man will claim as his beginning. Stars tenuous as chalk on a cave wall, destruction so loud it can only spore into timeless horns of silence. The swamps gasp open: egg, gristle, indigo-beating heart, the hairy carapace in halls of fire […]
Cynthia Dewi Oka: Pulses
begin the body’s wick the kidney-root of flame muscular palimpsest my father’s lips a memory of water hold vigil around the bed become garden float and bless life’s effort to lift the dark helmet : (a) he throbbed like a mountain range (b) cold is a field of tulips somewhere in northern Washington the sky […]
Cynthia Dewi Oka: Winter Country
Micah Moore: Jill pleads with Jack at the top of the hill
Carry for me, Jack, this pail of water. In the classic tune they tell, you fall. Not today, Jack. Come, the day gets hotter as we wait and, listen, the hill calls us downward. Every time they say you stumble, I clumsily am trailing in your wake, slipping as the rocks beneath us crumble into […]
Timothy McLafferty: Twice Dead
Odilon Redon painted Saint Sebastian many times, the standard image: bound to a plane tree and bristling with arrows. Left for dead by Emperor Diocletian it was Saint Irene who carried him home and nursed him back to health. Once mended, he resumed his ministries, until one day seeing the emperor pass by, he must […]