Brooklyn, July 2014 We cycle toward the Verrazano Narrows through a strand of sabbath islands. Teenage girls in black skirts go visiting like their mothers. Fridays, sirens sing at dusk, reminding us to divide our bodies from the calendar. Yesterday we woke to video of a man gasping his last rites. Machado at a friend’s […]
Poetry 94
Corwin Ericson: One Neighbor Is Naked, Tending His Garden, Another Chainsaws in Orange Safety Chaps.
In the Rain I stand stupidly at the window the robin stands stupidly in the yard. Neither of us has a worm. What I Recall from the Mushroom Walk It has a Latin binomial and a Norwegian folk name and may be lethal or delicious. It either weeps milk or empurples when slit. My Work […]
David Doyle: The Cobbled Sky
If I could touch it, feel the overcast sift between my fingertips, I would not wander the sour barley stench of thin grey walkways and startle sleeping pigeons for a cappuccino and soda slice. The café’s two ceramic bowls come alive with dripping violets beneath the creak of a wooden fish ubiquitous as the bog […]
David Doyle: Galway Rain
The swilling drips jump from roofs and trees, clapping their hands, stomping their feet, glowing like firework embers at cathedral heights down, down to the limestone spatter of funerals in motion. And soon the dam exhales particulate spit like a drunkard at a foul memory, and the river hisses hot smoke and smolders with the […]
Kierstin Bridger: To the Girl From the Reformatory Town
You wrestled against the clutches of brothers and cousins, etched lessons in your muscle, broke tendencies, rerouted synapse with unwritten chapters entitled, Risk, Pain, and Tolerance. Though pale and tender as your own, you clawed your way into their flesh; red scratches and waning moons of bruise. You carved a language of ferocious prey and […]
Kathleen Sheeder Bonanno: The Pool
My fifteen-year old son, adopted from Chile, pedals his bike back from the pool, says some boys just called him a Spic, and my brain explodes— Ping, ping, says my brain. Wait! says Louey. I get in the car, gun the gas pedal, stomp past two teenage lifeguards at the gate, on my way to […]