Behind the butcher shop’s fourth wall, when you still don’t know and I still haven’t told you, everyone I confide in knows not only will I kiss you when you have been eating fish, but I will kiss you when you have been eating chicken. I will kiss you if you eat a burger from […]
Poetry 89
Pamela Davis: /Antidote
Using a number 2 pencil, circle the word in each line that does not belong Barbie Dandelion Airbus Morgue Thong Shoe Ocean Wax Column Lamp Sitcom Taxes Boot Vow Crusade Jazz Masque Harpoon Gin Key School Military Apron Candle Drought Pistol Cello Brassiere Lawn Shroud Marble Spark
Nikki Paley Cox: Recliners
Just the sight of them—overstuffed, adjustable, heated— she doesn’t want any here in the new townhome, where puppies follow her from room to room, where she tries to rest on the couch. They all remind her of Norman: green microfiber in the basement replaced the maroon upholstered; two in the bedroom swapped for oversized occasionals that […]
John F. Buckley: On Kandinsky’s Open Green 1923
Absolute green is the most peaceful color there is: it does not move in any direction, has no overtones of joy or sorrow or passion, demands nothing, calls out to no one. -Vasily Kandinsky, Complete Writings on Art Beside the monochromatic road streaming past modernity’s big top, beneath the arcing of eyebrows and the […]
Annah Browning: Taken
It would be good to be received as a hat, taken into a lap, never intended for showing. Cleverly under the table, I could wait for God to arrive, rumble over like a waitress, like a plane. It would be good if there was a disease I could catch, make me nicer. It would be […]
John Blair: Aubade for Ash Wednesday
So this is how you think it is—hypocrisy and exhaltation, the rumble and rout of papier mache floats like river barges piled with double decks of bead-pitching drunks rolling porte-flambeaux from Tchoupitoulas Street clear to Canal, heads all John- the-Baptist on plate collars, and dancing- Salome spilling Vedic agni out in hot dribbles of burning […]