Slouched on a park bench, the daily storm kicking cans in your head You watch the faces move in slow parade among the tulips and bronze: Shoppers, retirees, students workers spilling from glass towers for a hot dog and a moment’s sun. The faces are wet cigars, creamed corn, barbed wire, broken clocks; the faces […]
Poetry 80
Ashley McWaters: Lesson
The body of work takes off her clothes, intending to shock. She is a skeleton; her shadow a warrior. I ask her what is her nom de plume, she replies she eats no chicken. I ask her to show what she wants, she draws a knife from under her foot and begins dancing a waltz […]
Jeff G. Lytle: Maybe We’re Quakers
Cataclysm. The juice of the ever after. A hard look from the Saint. But hey, even mediocre deaths are deaths, breathless and blue. Happen on a busted egg amid the garbage and gum of the sidewalk, its puny cargo ejected, naked and bony, into dead December. Or a divot in the foot of blizzard gathering […]
Teresa Leo: Online Dating
A year of surfing the profiles, where the men look for women the way women shop for shoes— ordering their size in a variety of styles: slingback, hook & loop, stiletto, the most impractical ones with points at the toes not built for a human foot, but the excitement of how they look in pictures, […]
Siel Ju: Longer
The clear truth of the moment is that it’ll pass. Any sort of desire or impetus or agency or ability of emotional closeness you feel right now – that’ll pass. What’s left’ll be the vague sense that you wanted something that may or may no longer be worth the effort. If it helps picture the […]
Brian Patrick Heston: An Echo
How you once nursed your Guinness listening to the Phillies on the scarred mahogany radio you bought before the war: speakeasy days before gram, asbestos days on ships rickety as planets before the old house of Christmases and Easters. In my dream you stroll ungodly hours, a broken lamp buzzing as a boy forms from […]