layers of rock the softer dirt collects, fountains with moist leaves of mint, scilla, purple hyacinth, and primula. * Boundaries, margins, hedgerows. Maintaining separate fields. But the leaves, branches, white hair of roots press beyond fences. * The clouds have woven countries. Rain falls here and somewhere else you might be moving, your feet touching […]
Contributors 64
John Bargowski: Supering at 206 Ogden Avenue
Zero weather, expect Bill bent over half the night shoveling coal into the mouth of the great furnace pumping steam and hot water to the thirty apartments in 206, and if your sink or toilet backed up you’d probably find him in his bermuda shorts and fireman boots wading through six inches of shit- filled […]
Priscilla Atkins: War Romance
How his eyes dilate at the famous pictures. Death yanked and slapped into pleasing compositions. The quickening in his buttocks and groin when he beholds the arching spine of the man-child slain on the field under Seminary Ridge. Gut in air, head forced back, legs delicately spread: a baby fighting the diaper, in extremis, erotic, […]
Priscilla Atkins: Like a Lily
At night, I long to recline like Sarah Bernhardt in the shape of a coffin, the way I imagine after a magnificent performance of Hamlet, she climbed into the significance of roses, then lay down exhausted in her silk-lined bed. Each elusive moment liquefying into one last murmuring spoonful, the whole world dissolving— even taxes, […]
Raphael Allison: The Idea of One Picture
The woman does not move. Her idea moves. In a series of ripples, quickly and with supreme assurance, derivative light expends itself, the idea of light. She is gathering her scarf into fleshy folds of yellow-white twill, slowly flagging its own unclocked motion. There were many pictures to make this one, as they say Flaubert […]