-I don’t know how the palm trees opened up my greedy heart. -Adam Zagajewski Evening is drawing to a close, and the baby who cannot yet crawl is shuffling herself across the quilt, defying the need for sleep. It’s 8, then 9, then 10 pm, and sometimes you think you’d like to shock […]
Contributors 86
Karen Sisk: For My Mother
Albatross mothers fly over water for hard glints, food signals to feed chicks flopping fuzzy, thin-skinned on lava-black beaches. They grab bottle caps, lighter fragments, fork and comb tines to regurgitate into gaping beaks, fill their chick’s loose coin purse bellies that starve and burst. Eyes shrivel to peppercorns. Bodies, bone and feather shadows, cracked […]
Elias Simpson: The swam limps across the courtyard
Why does the uncle with the stroke attempt complete sentences when butter will do? Elegance, even its loss, its drunkenness or disability, conveys the nature of a mind— that sureness of pleasure in itself.
Taije Silverman: Lingua
In what shapes do words stay while they wait to be spoken? Buonanotte absorbs into puddles on roadsides, immune to goodnight’s grip on grandfather clocks. Se fossi in te climbs through clean metal chain link while If I were you hangs on screens on back doors. In Italian the question of what does it mean […]
Taije Silverman: Itinerant
Thus spoke Proteus, and I was broken hearted as I heard him. –The Odyssey Between the airport and this latest of my half-inhabited cities, a dead stretch of smokestacks burns tanks full of fuel, dredged up out of disappeared sea beds. A bald man as dark as the dark in a closet sells […]
Marina Read Weiss: Birdwatching for the Intuitive
The bird— not five feet away— regards us(, not without fidgeting). Its settling is unsettling: tangerine belly, gray wings furled. A precise peak over which it knows the world. What is it? when did I cease to know? litanies of ignorance accelerate with the early summer heat like our hands dampening and I let […]