I planted lettuce while the farmer plowed something. There was a loud whirring. I put each leaf in the ground and dumped old rainwater over them. I became filthy. The dog found me and sniffed thoroughly. I let him. Then the whirring stopped and the farmer went into the woods with a small wooden pipe. […]
Poetry 64
Kristy Nielsen: 9:30 p.m.
“No, I don’t feel that he’s with me,” I say although I’m winning at cards and a warm breeze blows the hair from my face. Though the cat who likes no one sleeps in my lap and mosquitoes reject my blood tonight. I play the winking Jack of Spades and take the trick. The chair […]
Kristy Nielsen: Waiting to Be Rescued
In the suburbs a man kills another snake, chopping it with a hoe in front of the neighbors. I bend over in the field nearby in the long grass, open, crawling toward something to finger my senses awake. In the suburbs sun shines. Snakes return, men take up shovels and gleaming hoes. If my father […]
Wayne Miller: A Year in the Present Tense
I. Summer Walking across a golf course at night, I stop to pick up a tee, a thin white funnel planted in the grass. Or perhaps the smallest ear trumpet ever made, I can hear the nervous laughter of teenagers drinking on the seventh green, and I can hear the silence ten years ago, when […]
Candace McClelland: After the Sirens
Trace me with chalk So I know where I end And where the asphalt Begins. Draw around My edges, closely, in white. Show where I’m small and Where I’m not. On your crisp sheets, Touch me with fingers Rough and dry around My ankles, past my hips, Across my wrists so I know they exist. […]
Michael Hudson: Me and You in The Guinness Book of World Records
While you held your breath the longest and fell without a parachute the farthest, a distant church bell dragged its broken foot across our last Sunday morning together. And all through breakfast, the Heaviest Man in the World scraped his eggy fork across a greasy plate, making a sound like the oldest documented parrot (bald, […]