Split, by the bottomland creek in mid-October, a persimmon lay on a bed of netted leaves, waxy skin hiding the dazzle jack o’ lantern fruit. I extract an ant invader, lick my lips. A little rot sweetens it for sucking, like jelly Grandma boiled all summer— the sun with sugar and pectin, a drop or […]
Poetry 100
Gwendolyn Ann Hill: We, As Seeds
Right now, we are enduring a period of cold stratification, as we must. Let the sun droop low. Let the snow melt, crust, pile up, and melt again, tumbling over the husks of our bodies. Let the temperature drop. Let the starlings flock to peck at the detritus that engulfs us, […]
Gwendolyn Ann Hill: Unplanting a Seed
In a phone conversation with my mother we say good-bye first, and finally, after hours, hello. A ripe Brandywine turns from burnt umber, to pink, to green. Flesh hardens. Juices dry up. As the fruit lightens, stems lift their droop. My cousins and I collect my grandfather’s ashes from his fields, gathering […]
Ian Hall: Bellyache
Bless this queasy life oh lord the palsy of a well-pump you can’t wash the slop off under the chapped spigot. This outhouse where I’m holed up with the drizzling shits— my stomach in enough knots to earn a medal—the swollen room of my rectum rented out to these scum pipes clogged with cess Drain-O […]
Tanya Grae: Dear Ozy—
I named all my cities for you in this play of civilization, What You Can’t Know (or How Millennia Collapse to Seconds). I drove to St. Simons & ate dinner at the same table, but not the same meal. Oceans feed tears to oysters— little tombs of mouth & foot. I knelt in the morning […]
Tanya Grae: Duchess
There she stands as if alive. — Robert Browning If you would just be a better wife. If you would just be a better mother. If you would just be like my mother. If you would just get off the computer. If you would just get […]