There’s snow on the ocean, which is meant to confuse them and does, though not because they are unprepared for it but rather because the sight of it reminds them of the static-hearted parts of their bodies as they prostrate themselves in years-over-yonder: exploratory attempts to find warmth—not unlike a surefooted expedition—, in the disappearance […]
Poetry 101
July Westhale: Rotten Apples Return to Harvard’s Glass Flowers Exhibition
What you have heard is true— something rotten once got us from our houses, from our beds where what was there may or may not have been. Remember, my darling, my sweet, that a blistered and blackened thing, a thing representing life/ sin itself, was a cause for art. Gave a man, many men, […]
Stephen Gibson: Sappho in Love at the Bodleian Library Treasures in Oxford
Sappho promises the girl anything and says she’s in pain: if she can’t see her, she’ll die, she swears on papyri; the fragments are postage stamp in size with water stains. Sappho tells her she has nothing to lose, everything to gain— feet away from a page from Frankenstein by Mary Shelley while Sappho […]
Jeff Royce: LINEAGE
Man hands on misery to man. It deepens like a coastal shelf. —Phillip Larkin It began with horseradish in her mashed potatoes, her father slipping it in before dinner. (It began much earlier I suppose. But this is my mother we’re talking about, younger and thinner and unaware that fathers can be cruel.) […]
Jeff Royce: ANGEL TRUMPETS
I have this 1960’s sitcom desire to frolic on the back lawn. Our shirts will be fashioned after white sides of ranch style houses. Our hearts will take shapes of plastic Adirondack chairs. The kids can blow bubbles that’ll satellite the shed like little acrylic space shuttles. In the linen-scented afternoon, the backward-stumbling sunlight will […]
Sarah Best: BLACK SWANS
Some people are like cats. If you hold them too long, they will bite. So she stretched out across the cruel unbroken, rolling flatness of the Midwest to Chicago. Mrs. Dalloway among the macramé, finds her sheets in the rehabbed SRO clean and tight. On her nightstand brown bottles, and tan bottles; a découpaged […]