Gas giants ghost through the universe of my son’s reflector telescope. In its dime-sized mirror, he watches their state of being go from gas to liquid to something solid as the muskrat the owl comes up from the marsh with, squirming is its natural reaction to pain, its body’s knowledge that it will die in […]
poetry 96
Christina Cook: Doing the Dishes
I beget the continental drift of dish soap down the drain, tectonic shift of plates, planetary in the sense of belonging as everything belongs to the earth’s innermost sodden crust. Suds assemble into large masses of land. Hemispheres appear to rise up from the rinds of the evening meal. The planet implodes in the garbage […]
Patrick Boyle: Going Away Party
Max stands in the doorway with a bottle of whiskey. He is drunk and I am getting there. I follow the leader, the liter disappears as we play, as our throats pull fast shots. He deploys to Iraq in a few days, the inevitable soldier’s going. We’re drunk. We keep drinking. We drink drunk and […]
Kristina Bicher: Missing
After leaving our son in the mountains, we drove together back to separate homes, my ex-husband and I. Passed signs for caves. Caves inside other caves, a chain of holes beneath us, this road we drove once a vast sea. We passed Antietam, too, and because I like to hear him explain things, I ask […]
Rebecca Baggett: Daddy Box II
The locked box contains a pack of L&M cigarettes, a gray steel lighter, a frayed deck of cards, a brown beer bottle with a peeling label. Twist of black pepper, bottle of BBQ sauce, cup of dark coffee, handful of watermelon seed. A faded green cap, a black metal lunchbox, a scattering of wrenches and […]