Maybe I left it in that last book I was reading: PROSE, the writings of Elizabeth Bishop, hoping it would learn a thing or two about dexterity rubbing up against the art of description while bristling off the shores of Nova Scotia and those precipitous saintly white cliffs. That seems as probable a place as […]
Issue 92
Dan Rosenberg: Truth or Beauty
Left to itself your garden of three pepper plants stays planted, expands. The line between warming and burning flickers. Your guilty pleasures (Law & Order, nude hesitation before the open fridge) run on without you, but not without people like you.
Sarah Grigg Rolph: Roadkill
Such a death wouldn’t be so bad, as deaths go, rounded and quick. But the flattening, flattening: a parody of burial without even the mercy of rain, careless swift ironing until the body melts into the road. Only a threadbare tail, gray, blows back and forth in the breeze of the rushed living.
Annette Oxindine: Ex Libris
She watches the day blaze itself out, sun catching fire on patches of ice flecked, now, with salt. Too late to do her much good. He called from a phone booth around the corner saying something about readiness being all. With one arm still inside his coat, he led her to the narrow bed, pushed […]
Leah Poole Osowski: Female with Head of Flowers after Salvador Dali—female figure with head of flowers—1937
Does she see with her stamens? Cry in pollen and bees? A face in the desert must wilt, but look at her saunter, a swagger of hips, a leading thigh. Like a mockingbird chest the curve of her belly, shoulders dabbed with the scent of stature. Waterspouts spin from their coasts, cross prairies when she […]
Annmarie O’Connell: The cracked veins of a green leaf are imperfect
but intentionally touching at exactly the right places so they become almost beautiful all by themselves just like the way that man will never love you. In your rear view mirror, you see a stranger you have to love because he is sweating in his red bandana, so tired from work, you realize he really […]