I walk on in shade, filled with light: does day exist? Is this my tomb or my maternal dome? A pulsing beats against my skin like a cold shard that sprouts, hot, red, tender. Perhaps I’ve not yet been born, or have always been dead. Shade rules me. If this is life, what could death […]
Poetry 69
Laurel Snyder: The Girl Learns Forfeit
1. The girl’s sure that the silt in her tea is ground glass, and she thinks she’ll die soon. She wants to tell the boy, but they’re playing chess, and it’s his turn, so she gropes at her belly instead. The girl’s sure she’s bleeding on the inside. She lets go her teacup, but the […]
Susan Varon: Photograph for My Father
Something simple like an apple can make me cry if it is very small and fallen like the apples in our yard with their chalky taste, lying in dented grass. It’s been so long since I’ve seen something that pure, just the size of the lump in my throat when I posed for you in […]
Max Zimmer: After You Set Your Head On Fire The Rest Will Follow
The way your father waits for the bus to the slaughter house outside the house each morning with his brown shoes tied The way your father drowns in the noisy snoring of his daughter’s dreams at night through the thin rock of unpainted wall The way your father runs across the weeds of the fields […]
David Staudt: Turnpike
He never gets used to waking his mother Sunday afternoons to tell her he’s going, the late winter light in her bedroom weak as her body releasing from sleep; the sauerkraut in Ball jars buckled to the seat; how pulling the ticket lifts the gate at the one open toll booth on the hillside; or […]
Jackie Sheeler: Split Geometry
When twenty miles of sea and city stretched itself between your door and mine, we lived inside each others’ skin, compressing distance into exotic equations unsolvable outside the act of love. I moved closer, and you moved away– space reversed in the lens of an insane camera, inside shed the skin of outside and all […]