Because you will not talk about your mother’s hands or describe further the meat of her left thumb almost gone as if eaten down to the bone, and because it is too early yet to imagine your mother’s breast brushed with prep gauze, held in some nameless palm, an attendant knuckle There to mark just […]
Poetry 84
R.A. Villanueva: As the river crests, mud-rich with forgotten things
Colors this summer Raritan carries: of this flailing, flaring New Jersey sunset of the burnt-ends of cigarettes as they and gravity then the river kiss Red’s surge toward night- fall: a dark diastole rich with the blood of pigeons, worms, catfish—a mercury blood, heavy with gas This orange Raritan This drunk, Dutch princess flanked as if by knights: trunks bent, leadened […]
Danielle Veith: Tsunami / The Reporter
Egalitarian damage, the reporter wrote, to homes of those of all religions, puts paid to the notion of a God who takes sides. But shrines in every town— Crucifix, Buddha, Shiva— spared. • You, and I, same God. All, same God, a Sri Lankan says to a reporter. • White flags everywhere: fluttering from phone […]
Maureen Thorson: Tomatoes
Hours spent parting the vines in search of blossoms, hauling the gallons and slopping them over bristling stalks. A gross promise of fertility. Last winter, I dreamed of red valleys stung with growing lanterns, a rustle on the wind. But the vines are fruitless and the air is still. Still I bring the water, thinking […]
Maureen Thorson: Three Squares and No Funning
They linger in the evening round the chuckwagon, slurping beans and thinking of apple pie, of Sunday chicken dinners. When they wake, there’ll be coffee burnt and stretched like it was hiding something Cookie wanted to know. There’s a human price to the stock that comes through Abilene, and you can count it in lost […]
Maureen Thorson: Otter Pop Blues
Mirrors in mirrors, in mirrors, in mirrors: bitter diminution. The rest of the material is a jaundiced blob of colors, water sweating from a plastic sleeve, barely remembered candy necklaces softening in the deep waters of summer pool parties. A single luna moth taking refuge in the shadow of the changing room’s concrete overhang. Then […]