Pirates unfuck her cunt, unplucked from sockets, eyes unfixed, undilated, can’t unwitness every unkind crime, every ungrief. Seas unlush with bloody unrooted hair swarm with unkempt men, the ends of whose arms still handed, as yet unhooked, strum rough guitars. Strings unsnap as bodies uncouple. The girl waves a black flag, unsurrendering her remains to […]
Poetry 96
Kate E. Schultz: Coffee
When he told me, “I read all of your poems before drinking my morning coffee,” I knew he was smitten. Each morning, he had cups and cups, always dark-roast. He’d get out of bed before me to grind the beans finer than silt. The water ran in the shower; the coffee gurgled and trickled from […]
Laura Sobbott Ross: The Walrus in the Tea Leaves
For Doug Darling, it wasn’t the news you’d expected. And when you told me about it, I’d giggled, conjured images of broken symmetries— kaleidoscope and compass, magnetic poles and mirrors gone random. I knew what you were hoping for, how you’d tilted your throat back and swallowed down the void. The psychic parsing through the […]
Laura Sobbott Ross: Déjà Vu
—1979 There has to be darkness and a highway. Beyond the shoulders of the road, a topography, splayed and lit in street lamps. You’re seventeen, and Hotel California is playing on the radio. If you look close enough, you can see the silhouette of mountains beyond your own reflection in the car window. To the […]
Laura Sobbott Ross: Bora, Bora
1996 A shaft of blue splintered into a thousand nuances, shed them into the sea beneath our tiki hut— wedged on stilts into hunger clouds of shimmery fish, oysters lipping black pearls. We married there, on the shore between the neon chakra of sky & water, a handful of drowsy natives shaking New Year’s Eve […]
Scott Romani: My Country Song
My country song would smell like mixed colognes on a twin bed in a college dorm room, before I had to find a rhyme for masc only. It would be a list of the long gone—buried in the dating app graveyard I call my phone. My lonely country song would swell with strings and text […]