Tell me, William, was it worth it? Do you remember the long shadows in that square, the way your shoes scuffed on the cobblestones, the way the multitudes cowered at the perceived authority of one man? Not you. You walked on by. So many of us work and work to make a legacy, but when […]
Poetry 81
Lauren Water: Now I Wonder
(Eurydice still in Hell) Now I wonder if he looked back on purpose to get rid of me and commit to living with grief, a less demanding companion. As he mourns me in solitude, the songs that cascade from the lyre make gods, humans, and animals intoxicated with sorrow. He wrenches water from granite and […]
Robin Beth Schaer: Contrition
A keening culprit, I came unzipped, unwed. My penance, to be province, to lie across a millstone bed, ground to powder, to be wife again. And you, my conspirator, my paramour, you strapped your longing to a sail, sent from town, sent to be lost. But trilobites cluster beneath your feet on mountaintop that was […]
Laura McCullough: Button
His hands felt like paws or flippers, big and inarticulate, as if the spaces between shoulder socket and elbow joint and between the finger bones had all fused in the August sun, a kind of annealing, so what had once been uncured now had been except that mobility and utility had been replaced with one […]
Sean Patrick Hill: The Flaying of Marsyas
This unavoidable pilgrimage is my self-portrait: Wandering through poppies in the Provençal fields, I heard spades sink in gravelly ground, an old woman digging Turf. In the furrows, a flute fallen among sunflowers. I played peasant songs for plates of boiled potatoes To commoners and wanderers in the shadows of a cypress. Night painted no […]
James Cihlar: Mr. Purvis
“You might die writing a five hundred page novel” –Alice Munro What we must know at seventy-eight. The thrill a veteran with leukemia gets when comparing his slutty masseuse Roxanne to Alexander the Great’s wife Roxanne. Earnest Bottoms, a country scholar’s nickname for Ernie Botts, her neuter cousin. Death is on the horizon. We can […]