Today when I was icing all the cupcakes—how many? Dozens or maybe hundreds, enough to keep me busy for six hours—I did not, not even for one single cupcake, make the effort to make sure I was putting a lot of love into it I usually do that. I think about how swirly the icing […]
Poetry
Meri Culp: Stalker
Keep your steely-eyed offerings, your garden pretense, botanical bliss, your reedy wisp of asparagus, no longer green-speared, but gray-leaden. Hold in check your artichoke words, the petal pull of anger-dipped butter, core-covering the heart of new spring, my palmed heart, still tender, still looking for unsullied celery, small boats of clean, green sea washing to […]
Abraham Burickson: The View
He figures the air’s there to carry words for her. Charlie sees it. Her voice shivers it, her voice: perfect, from a perfect body; no, imperfect: what wreckage her young body bore. You wouldn’t think. Those chlorophyll eyes that wash him, those hands, crushed once under a world of rocks. That’s the past: a heart […]
Ricardo Pau-Llosa: Parable of the Chair
At the bar, the man’s buddy’s eyes scavenge in arcs for women ambulating as the man tried to explain why he hadn’t quite gotten over his wife’s betrayal and otherwise moved on, ground these beans of wisdom into flour, kneaded them into bread and so forth, except the metaphor of bread was like the seed […]
Wendy Noonan: Loom, Luminous
There’s the platter of meats laid out for our guests; wine, deviled-egg sandwiches; and the open field, scrubby and littered, under the fire escape where the kids go to smoke; there’s the broken down Toppys furniture truck in that field, and the old men walking up Mississippi smelling like cigars and fifty years of dumb […]
Paul Lisicky: First Birthday
War in the news. Hunger in the news. What of the following could stand up to that? The waitress set down the plates. Car noise rolled in from the street. The rotisserie chicken so spicy and sweet, my eyes watered. After I’d finished my own plate, I started eating off of Mark’s. The waitress came […]