Category: Issue 19
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TWO POEMS by Melissa Crowe
SOBRIETY SONNET with apologies to my brother, 11 months clean The boy who cried sunlight, summer rain, bird-in-the-bush, in the hand, who cried fiddleheads, brook trout, berries in the field by the chicken house, again and again who cried lilacs, from each bloom a hit of nectar…
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COMMENCEMENT SPEECH, DELIVERED TO A HERD OF WALRUS CALVES by Matthew Olzmann
Young walruses, we all must adapt! For example, some of your ancestors gouged the world with four tusks, but you can grow only two. It’s hard to say what evolution plans for your kind, but if given a choice,you should put in a request for thumbs. Anyway, congratulations! You’re entering a world that’s increasingly hostile and cruel and full of people…
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MONSIEUR REYNARD by Holly M. Wendt
Renaud com richchande thurgh a roghe greveAnd alle the rabel in a res, ryght at his heles.— “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” by anonymous but what is the fox to think, duck-tumbling through green with all the dogs baying at his heels, of the scene unfolding across a hill inside stone walls much…
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ALL WE HAD TO DO WAS SWIM by Jon Bohr Heinen
I ducked down a side street when I saw the red and blue lights coming from the police cruisers blocking the Burnside Bridge. My big brother, Joel, trailed after me and asked, What’re you doing? I told him I’d never seen so many cops before; the only policeman I’d encountered was the one who visited…
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EXCERPT FROM THE HISTORY OF LITERACY by K-Ming Chang
Smaller Uncle claimed he could predict a flood was coming when all his nose-hairs swooned and sprinkled the sink. A long time ago, before he washed cars, he used to be a weatherman, which I thought meant he could manufacture weather, plucking out strands of his own hair to double as lightning, the way the…