My country song would smell like mixed colognes on a twin bed in a college dorm room, before I had to find a rhyme for masc only. It would be a list of the long gone—buried in the dating app graveyard I call my phone. My lonely country song would swell with strings and text […]
issue 96
Todd Pierce: If Only You Could Remember
When we came upon the muddy river between the mountains I realize now were not there, our dog crawling out of the lungs of the mysterious beast he found ahead of us, lost as much but more at home, we learned to distinguish dream from wish, surrounded by the forest’s tired breath chilling the sky, […]
William Nixon: Animal Music
All my life, the animals have been fleeing, the eagle around the river bend, saying adios with its white tail broom, the ring-necked snake hardly bigger than pencil lead startled on my carpet, S-curving at super baby snake spe ed for the bookcase. Orpheus, you would have called them back with your lyre, enchanting the […]
Michael Montlack: Karen
What age, outfit, expression will be there at the gate? Not the last you: limbs clenched, refusing to release your essence. And not the anxious twenty-something whose husband bolts post-diagnosis. How about the high-schooler with Mae West lips and a face skinny girls envy, lip-lining perfectly during a parallel park, the not-yet-released U2 single blaring […]
Adam McGee: The Reenactors
There’s no end to the things they will show us, the reenactors on TV: falling off buildings, surviving wrecks, robbing a bank. These girls were best friends but one murders the other. This one has a tapeworm the length of a bus. Often, the show can’t afford for them to speak, so their stories are […]
Pam Matz: As Snow
for P.M., 1920-2007 Until the end, which was sudden you were dying a long time and because I’d been casting my mind toward yours for years I was afraid I would go with you slide over the cliff being tied to you I haven’t yet arranged for the plaque next to the pathway under the […]