Last bells in town with bronze bronze tinge the evening. Even if I hadn’t heard the shuddering board, the splash, the laughter, I’d have known from the quaver of voices over water that this is the last house in summer, and now is the double loneliness of missing a party you don’t even want to […]
Issue 70
Philip Pardi: Boy In Cedar, Robin In Grass
Each one studies a fabric unseen from up close: weaving of limbs and what green and such sky and voices lulled low. Each one notes the other along song-shaped lines, discovers sight-reading is the closest we get to love if by love we mean knowing when to close our eyes. Somewhere nearby my son is […]
Daniel Nester: Rodinesque Triptych Plus
I. December in the Delaware Valley and the boy daydreams of joyrides, limp crab apples chucked from car windows. His legs are trembling! II. —He sleeps in a township beyond commonplace, beyond get-outta-here. The boy can bend his elbows into his arms. III. And then there’s this one part when wet thuds on late-model hoods […]
Karen Miller: Bedroom Community
Over coffee he says how sometimes on his own he unloads those 2,000 pounds of frozen chickens he drove across four states. He demonstrates his muscles, he bares his teeth. She picks up the bill, saying, uh huh, uh huh, sweetly, uh huh, uh huh. She is not so much settling as sleeping her New […]
Timothy Liu: Ode To The Garden State
Chockfull O’Nuts mixing in with Elizabeth’s sulfuric Southerly breeze as a groom badly bruises both of his shins on a turnstile-hop mishap trying to catch a commuter train instead of bedding down his bride on hay suffused with camel piss from God knows where and insects from Peru crushed by the tens of thousands to […]
Nancy Kuhl: Apology for New Wives
Cigarette smoke twelve miles from the ocean and the birds in the wall are beginning to escape. One by one. They always leave the box behind, the telegrams and empty envelopes. All of it flimsy and so much missing. The hoax of relic bones and the goddess of hinges are buried in the still frozen […]