Our workbook said the men who flew to the moon and saw our round, our perfect planet, blue faith in the vast black space of pupils, knew the shape of peace and wept. The blood monsoon in ‘Nam poured through America’s moon-croon. My Lai, unknown to us, too far from view. Listen, the counselors said, […]
Poetry 85
Jessica D. Hand: Codependent Love Song
Baby, I’m a bag of synapses clapping connections for you – gonna pull out my veins, tie you to the bed. Take a kidney. Take my breath. Match my blood, and take that too. I will inhale your exhale, will break my bones to break your falls, will love my in-laws. Peel off my fingernails; […]
Jesse DeLong: There Is Too Much Fucking Sun
Driving down Sonny’s Boulevard, Williston, Tennessee, a curtain of heat draped over my windshield like a slab of meat. My muscles panted. My tongue a lilted dogwood leaf. The pedals were too heavy to control. As I hit a road-lump, I thought of my life as a fly catcher fastened to a window, the strip […]
Doug Ramspeck: Arterial Moon
Like the moon outside the window bloated at the belly like a deer she saw once frozen by the creek, crusted with snow, as though it had nothing to do with happiness or death but arterial longing: the children that sprang manifold from the body, sticky with blood, their appearance like a fever breaking, the […]
Delana Dameron: Weary Kingdom
I want to love this city. I want to love this corner where I hail a cab to ferry me further into Harlem’s belly; this corner where men perch on milk crates, shoot craps, open their dailies; this corner where each morning I pass a coated man who doesn’t recognize my litany of No thank […]
Delana Dameron: Hudson View
I wake to an empty bed, the hair near the nape of my neck cold, damp. I flip the light in the kitchen, jump at the flurry across the floor. Its helplessness: a mouse thrashing nervously in this new world I made for him, trying to find its way back. Up against the wall last […]