The walk-in closet has its say of early dates Gone awry with a tiny brown silk, its column Shrivels upon the floor to reveal the transparencies Of violet, white veins on hands reaching for After dinner drinks, crackers with olive placed hats You later sit wilted upon wrinkled sheets, Unalarmed your thin straps keep falling […]
Poetry 89
Karen An-hwei Lee: Song of Vayeira
Blindsided. After leaving the wreck, I looked back at a phosphor city without turning. I was not anyone’s wife. God had not commanded me otherwise. What I witnessed – who sought shelter at the last minute. Stones began to shatter and flow under the sanctuary. Yesterday, angels came to warn us. What we built lay […]
Joseph O. Legaspi: Pigs
From house to house, my sisters and I knocked on our neighbors’ doors and once let in we tiptoed into their kitchens, or beyond, onto cement patios where we emptied their tin cylinders of leftover foods into plastic pails filling up with slop to feed our pigs. Unlike clear water from a well, the stews […]
Joseph O. Legaspi: Rouge
From her floral make-up purse my mother has fished out, flipped open her seashell compact, the rabbit tail brush dabbed with pressed powder swept across my face, feathering into alabaster, a masking. Throughout my grade school performances— whether stuffed inside a tomato costume or sandwiched between cardboards to resemble a book—my mother has applied liquid […]
Aaron Krol: The Zoo Has Been Closed to the Public
The lion? They had to put it down, or so was the judgment of counsel, who even came by to see it, cupped on the floor of its enclosure in equal communion with its red medicine ball abandoned in the grass. The fire in its fur made furious shapes from which its dark eyes were […]
Caleb Kaiser: What Happened in Gehenna
There’s a sort of silence, call it cancer. Call it rabbit pelts, bellies stuck with olive switches. There’s a soft-spot, just behind the ear. Hatchet that birthmark and you can swallow someone whole. Us sons have bits of daddy-skull for adam’s apples. Some say the gravesite has my eyes, that I come from a family […]