We watch them do this, expand from all directions like lungs abruptly filling with water, as we hold hands and walk through the eye of another storm. A man grabs his crotch, offering it to my wife, flings a mouthful of spit and epithets towards us. Each pupil is a dim swamp flooding, silence blanketing […]
Poetry 94
Kerri French: Cherry Hill
I stood with my back to the cathedral, the streets of the town no busier than before. Narrowboats lined the river where branches swept the water, the house where we first lived steps from the path of the flood. From the top window, I used to listen for the call of the trains, the baby […]
J.M. Farkas: Everywhere Except Idaho
I am lonely as a hamburger, drunk as a cocktail napkin. Sunk as the mother trying to out-hot her teenage daughter on this carpeted dance floor in matching spandex tube tops. The bartender dons a bowtie, spills over and over, the details of his sordid divorce, pours that Same Old Same Old into anyone spongy […]
Clara Changxin Fang: The Other Side of Night
The Buddhist monk instructs us to pay attention to our breathing but all I can think of is the way you touched me before I left for Utah, like oil splattered on the wrist, like snow falling on bare shoulders. For the next two years the great bowl of the Salt Lake valley was cleft […]
Clara Changxin Fang: Don’t Go Away
The night shakes its wings and the sky hasn’t folded its whitewashed lawn chairs. Hyacinths in the garden gleam like pale fire, the forests are crammed with shadowy fish. I heard you say: I don’t know when I’m coming back. Once, I lost my car in a strange city while we circled the streets searching […]
Clara Changxin Fang: Lost Colony
Settled in the Spring of 1584, Roanoke was the first English colony in North America. We built two story houses with stone walls on dry mud, the island a crumbling sandbar pummeled by wind and waves. We erected fences and fence posts, laid claim to a patch of wilderness like Ptolemy mapping the heavens, giving […]