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 […]
Poetry
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 […]
Todd Pierce: If Only You Could Remember
When we came upon the muddy river between the mountains I realize now were not there, our dog crawling out of the lungs of the mysterious beast he found ahead of us, lost as much but more at home, we learned to distinguish dream from wish, surrounded by the forest’s tired breath chilling the sky, […]
William Nixon: Animal Music
All my life, the animals have been fleeing, the eagle around the river bend, saying adios with its white tail broom, the ring-necked snake hardly bigger than pencil lead startled on my carpet, S-curving at super baby snake spe ed for the bookcase. Orpheus, you would have called them back with your lyre, enchanting the […]