The sand before me like water, fluid and holy under the cratered crown nearly half-awake, circling as I draw the one way I know—stick figures in a backdrop scenery, thick- headed and content, wheeling psalms of birds, wide-sloping M’s grouped in permanent murmur. I don’t bother with the sun’s face, bare […]
Poetry
Nick Visconti: Burial
It is love, not grief, which inters the deceased in a hill made of clay. Sod embraces crossed arms, legs, eyes shut looking forever at nothing […]
David Rosenheim: Bangkok
a tree grows through the open roof of the café ferns and orchids drape low and heavy with bloom over conversations closely held by pairs that make no notice of the surround sound: squid frying in back a saw cutting metal down the road their consonant chatter in interleaving languages whose meaning you […]
Danielle Roberts: Reassurance
1— My cat startles & I tell her nothing bad is happening, but we both know that’s a lie on a large enough scale. She hears the neighbors’ doors slam, the child in the ceiling crying like an injured mouse. She knows footfalls on the landing lead to the uninvited lead to us […]
Danielle Roberts: Extracting memories
Extracting memories[1] Speak to me in layered tongues of bitten snow, slow molars carved with frost collected in the valleys between your teeth. The scientist bores a core— plucks the long memory from each glacier—this meter holds your first bicycle ride, this a bridal veil of volcanic ash from Pompeii, six cylinders of […]
Danielle Roberts: How can I leave this behind?
after Jeanann Verlee’s Helen Considers Leaving Troy after a floral gin cocktail Do I want to live and die my whole life here— buried in county lines—or is it time to stretch the map? There’s more to plan than simply running away. while holding my niece Picking up […]