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 […]
Issue 68
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 […]
Simon Perchik: 3 Poems
* New Jersey’s oldest abandoned iron mine —even this sprout sacrificed, its only leaf as if inside some small cage the last summer left turning yellow, fell —I listen for feathers for this paper unfolding almost a flower —the Times reports canaries gagging by the millions :trees disappearing in black love notes in myself, in […]
Gregory Pardlo: Atlantic City Sunday Morning
Plow-piled snow shrouded in shadow from the abbreviating sun, snow frosted with the exhaust of tour buses. Pigeons shift in congress. Sun glints windshields & chrome like cotton blooms in the monitors. Surveillance here is catholic. From cornices cameras oscillate like raven-heads nestled along palisades. Cameras mind entrances, pedestrians, traffic, the landscape from land’s end […]