What age, outfit, expression will be there at the gate? Not the last you: limbs clenched, refusing to release your essence. And not the anxious twenty-something whose husband bolts post-diagnosis. How about the high-schooler with Mae West lips and a face skinny girls envy, lip-lining perfectly during a parallel park, the not-yet-released U2 single blaring […]
Poetry
Adam McGee: The Reenactors
There’s no end to the things they will show us, the reenactors on TV: falling off buildings, surviving wrecks, robbing a bank. These girls were best friends but one murders the other. This one has a tapeworm the length of a bus. Often, the show can’t afford for them to speak, so their stories are […]
Pam Matz: As Snow
for P.M., 1920-2007 Until the end, which was sudden you were dying a long time and because I’d been casting my mind toward yours for years I was afraid I would go with you slide over the cliff being tied to you I haven’t yet arranged for the plaque next to the pathway under the […]
Maria Martin: Holding Pattern
It is difficult to describe objects anymore. As soon as I begin to describe an object, I see a woman alone on the telephone and then I fall asleep. The woman is losing her hair. She stands in and out of the light that falls from a kitchen window, not thinking of anything. It is […]
Michael Levan: Solu-Medrol
The man can only find words / to help his wife; he is unaccomplished / in so many ways that are useful to the world. / And sometimes he can’t even do that, but here, maybe, are these words / that stand for his hopes for her, for them, for the boy, / and the […]
Marcia LeBeau: Letter to Myself at Eighty
I hope you know you’re still lovely, with a tongue that can knot a maraschino cherry stem, then turn the world straight. Your wrinkled branches remain for you to dance in the wind. Remember, on your most ragdoll-of-days, you are holy. But why am I telling you this? Surely you know more now than I […]