I can’t get settled, the floor scattered with boxes, each day filled with unpacking, placing and building. Pigeons shuffle on the fire escape or sleep with heads tucked into iridescent necks, pacing on the windowsills, gray bodies anchored by pinkish feet. Zut, zut – nests plastered with shit, feathers and dirt, flu and viruses levitate […]
Contributors 80
Marilyn McCabe: In Vino Veritas
I. Sacred as a blessing, profane as a drunk; we always break the glass: Just as the pulp slips from the skin so the ferment bares something in us. Opens us, a cave mouth. Angels stream in as the whistle of wind through mallards’ coasting wings; or demons issue out in gaping voiceless howl, depending […]
Teresa Leo: The Heart has the Capacity to Break and Reset a Million Times
But it’s the million and first, say, that begins in a cab to Woodside, Queens with a hockey player, who’s also a musician and a city planner, who might be a one-night stand, but he’s the best kisser you’ve come across in years, with a face that’s all elegy and nostalgia, edges but smooth, the […]
Keetje Kuipers: Speaking as the Mail Poet
I would like to write the fistfight poem, which I have never had the pleasure of (I hit him once but he wouldn’t hit me back) or I might visit a prostitute (girl, woman, professional or not) and then confess to you my shame (oh, to be the doer of the deed!)— the death of […]
Kathryn Hunt: The Visitation
Last night a black fox came to the door, its eyes turning to ice when the light caught them. It considered me through the glass, loped away while I ran room to room to go on seeing. At the hour for zazen I ate chocolate instead. A bird pecked away at a tree like my […]
James Engelhardt: Regarding the Distance Between Our Suburbs
It was bitter vacation he will tell you, an ocean of stinging and poisonous things. Nightclubs of women wearing only three starfish, drinking curaçao, not sharing black cigarettes with him. Home is not vacation, the bitter man will say, at home, children come to the capitol for the football championship. They are soft and incomplete […]