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Poetry 81

Elizabeth Thorpe: William Tell

May 11, 2011 by PBQ

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 […]

Filed Under: Contributors 81, Fiction, Fiction 81, Issue 81 Tagged With: Contributors 81, Elizabeth Thorpe, Poetry, Poetry 81

Lauren Water: Now I Wonder

May 11, 2011 by PBQ

(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 […]

Filed Under: Contributors 81, Issue 81, Poetry, Poetry 81 Tagged With: Contributors 81, Lauren Water, Poetry, Poetry 81

Robin Beth Schaer: Contrition

May 11, 2011 by PBQ

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 […]

Filed Under: Contributors 81, Issue 81, Poetry, Poetry 81 Tagged With: Contributors 81, Poetry, Poetry 81, Robin Beth Schaer

Laura McCullough: Button

May 11, 2011 by PBQ

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 […]

Filed Under: Contributors 81, Issue 81, Poetry, Poetry 81 Tagged With: Contributors 81, Laura McCullough, Poetry, Poetry 81

Sean Patrick Hill: The Flaying of Marsyas

May 11, 2011 by PBQ

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 […]

Filed Under: Contributors 81, Issue 81, Poetry, Poetry 81 Tagged With: Contributors 81, Poetry, Poetry 81, Sean Patrick Hill

James Cihlar: Mr. Purvis

May 11, 2011 by PBQ

“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 […]

Filed Under: Contributors 81, Issue 81, Poetry, Poetry 81 Tagged With: Contributors 81, James Cihlar, Poetry, Poetry 81

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