Down House, home of the Darwin family My father and I love pigeons because of the many ways they might go wrong: No appetite, watery droppings, air in the crop, swollen eyes, or unable to eat corn. Some have tail feather cases that don’t open. Last year we had baby fantails whose crops became filled […]
Contributors 95
Paul Nelson: Coyotes
In a shaft of brass light down through spruce, a big chocolate male, done for the year, pads across moss, dissolves in shadow. The tattered blond bitch stands in bright spring grass edging the woods. Hanks drag from her molting flanks, ears alert for mice and voles. Two pale kits dive after each other. Shorter […]
Paul Nelson: Coyote
Last December, just beyond the windows where we stand with wine, she clawed for frozen apples in her new coat beneath the tree the children climbed. Just bred we guessed. I just wanted to caress her muzzle and ears, lower my face to her eyes, say something as if she were a dog, something fatuous […]
M.D. Myers: Hotel Bluebeard
after Rimbaud Sensation he is and now. We can’t believe how golden his grin, holding his doors open during this heady winter, detoxifying our food, drink, rages, troubles, feeding them back to us. Sensation he is and future. His butcher’s block is ebony, his cleaver is inset with diamonds. When he yields, when his arm […]
Ann E. Michael: If Only
Why didn’t Gregor Samsa use his wings, she wonders. Surely he’d have weighed enough to batter and break the narrow bourgeois windowpanes of his parents’ fettered house: thunk, thunk clattering like a junebug until the glass shattered under his urgency, if only he had felt urgency. She thinks she would have understood him clasped in […]
Jennie Malboeuf: The Part of My Father Will Be Played by Jack Nicholson
Big white teeth. My brother reminds me he isn’t Irish. But the brows are the same. Horned and intense, he’ll do a plum job. In this scene, something isn’t right. The lighting is strange; the furniture that was there is now here. Or gone entirely. Someone is standing in the background that wasn’t just before. […]