was a drunk, lived in a house rented from her sister, three bedrooms, two baths, a Kelvinator in the kitchen you could stash a body in, a Gaffers & Sattler with burners that glowed like hot chrysanthemums. I spent summers there. Unpredictability spread through the air like crabgrass over a lawn. The wind under the […]
Poetry 92
Mitchell Untch: The Lost Poem of Marianne & Elizabeth
Maybe I left it in that last book I was reading: PROSE, the writings of Elizabeth Bishop, hoping it would learn a thing or two about dexterity rubbing up against the art of description while bristling off the shores of Nova Scotia and those precipitous saintly white cliffs. That seems as probable a place as […]
Dan Rosenberg: Truth or Beauty
Left to itself your garden of three pepper plants stays planted, expands. The line between warming and burning flickers. Your guilty pleasures (Law & Order, nude hesitation before the open fridge) run on without you, but not without people like you.
Sarah Grigg Rolph: Roadkill
Such a death wouldn’t be so bad, as deaths go, rounded and quick. But the flattening, flattening: a parody of burial without even the mercy of rain, careless swift ironing until the body melts into the road. Only a threadbare tail, gray, blows back and forth in the breeze of the rushed living.
Annette Oxindine: Ex Libris
She watches the day blaze itself out, sun catching fire on patches of ice flecked, now, with salt. Too late to do her much good. He called from a phone booth around the corner saying something about readiness being all. With one arm still inside his coat, he led her to the narrow bed, pushed […]
Leah Poole Osowski: Female with Head of Flowers after Salvador Dali—female figure with head of flowers—1937
Does she see with her stamens? Cry in pollen and bees? A face in the desert must wilt, but look at her saunter, a swagger of hips, a leading thigh. Like a mockingbird chest the curve of her belly, shoulders dabbed with the scent of stature. Waterspouts spin from their coasts, cross prairies when she […]