A single-engine biplane Sputtered and crashed Into the gated Boca Bath And Tennis Club, clipping A stand of trees, and narrowly Missing the Olympic pool. Residents observed it in very slow motion Come down. It clipped the tall palms To the west of the pool Then glanced off the power tower, A witness, from his […]
Contributors 68
BJ Ward: ROY ORBISON’S LAST THREE NOTES
12 mph over the speed limit on Route 80, I realize the way I know the exact size of my bones is the way I know I am the only one in America listening to Roy Orbison singing “Blue Bayou” at this precise moment right now, and I feel sorry for everyone else. Do they […]
Steven Tarlow: Night Soil
1. At 2 A.M. I slip into My garage and padlock The door behind me. From their wall pegs My garden tools emit A faint green light. They comfort me; the piles Of decaying newspaper Also comfort me. I stand a long time Over my plastic herb trough. Whatever is at hand I am prepared […]
Elizabeth Scanlon: Home Suite
I. The wash of stroller wheels reveals the sidewalk’s return to sand. One pushes another forward into an uncertain future— mama baby buggy bumper – our origins on parade, this moment of longing that compels many to do much, make more. The pusher strides forth with her antenna, an extension of herself , believing this […]
Elizabeth Scanlon: Passerby
My foothold is tenoned and mortised in granite, I laugh at what you call dissolution, And I know the amplitude of time. – Walt Whitman The stone walls of Pennsylvania, mossed grays veined with dim tinsel, whip by the car window, rows of Wissahickon schist skirt the fields, stop short where roads cut in and […]
T.B. Rudy: Building
Soot blossoms: nature works in fits and starts wedged in here between two coursing interstates, gray as developers’ photographs. By the creek, rats drink the rainbow runoff of suburban waste, scatter at my flashlight whenever I come back evenings to think, sit beneath this bone-cold chimney standing houseless among bankrupt wrecks: a bulldozer rusted in […]