Category: Issue 36

Nightingale The good nightingalecarries her song in her throat. It’s me you were discovering. The joy of those sunrises:that we were our own joy. She knew how to skip contentedly, like a little tomboy, in the middle of the street.She knew how to speak, how to be silent, to sleep.Yes, she was lovely and sweetness,…

Abyssal Like an entire winter. Like Bruegel in the snow with his hunters,the barking of dogs in the kennel.In deep barbarity, in elemental constancy,in the frenzy of fire where February has lain for a year. He is dead.But his shadow lives.And I grow in his shadow like a bitter grain,unable to break the shackles of…

18 November 2024 I have no time in some respects, or so I believe. Too much also, that does not matter either. I was out in the arroyos and climbing the ridges and I did a prayer and I always say aloud the date but yesterday I came home and went online and saw I…

The house was bright as a foreign star and utterly pristine. The dog was an appendage to this cleanliness. He was washed outside the house once a week. There was also a cat, but her cleanliness belonged to her. Every day she brought it upon herself. She never left the house, so she couldn’t be…

I first saw the beautiful houses from the window of my English classroom. The baseball and football fields rolled out below and just past the scoreboard there stood a row of four or five Victorians in a spread of pastel colors. They were unlike the pastels I’d seen in the Florida Keys or the Jersey…

When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished. –Czeslaw Milosz Words from a man I want to make   my husband: I think you should go      for the biggest thing you can think of— I go for a walk under old growth   Sitka spruce— look at the ground—      try to imagine all the biggest things I…

The summer after Halley’s Comet swung do-si-doaround the solar system, I grew six inches,and a local boy who helped usbale hay on Saturdaysnecked me behind the corn criblike a fawn on a salt block,his eyes too bright to deny.My belly burned for days. After a weekin binoculars, the comet taught meabout sublimation and Kepler, spacetimeas…

The train to the city was alwayslate. I dressed in silk straps decoratedwith every seductive spell.I pricked myself to test their strength. Buta system cannot demonstrateits own consistency. I did not longto merge with the mathematician. In hisstark apartment at Ninth and South, wecollided. We made adiagonal argument.My living situation took a long timeto explain.…

In one of my earliest memories, my mother asks me what I want to be for Halloween and I say a lake, which she mishears as leek, so she starts talking about how leeks accumulate dirt, something I didn’t appreciate until the first time I made potato-leek stew, the grit like tiny beads that had…

Con cò mà đi ăn đêm**  Đậu phải cành mềm, lộn cổ xuống ao ***  Night darkens on an egret’s porcelain wings. A lullaby begins and ends with silence.     Mother’s love begins and ends with silence.    A branch snaps. The egret tumbles into death.  A bomb blasted. My mother tumbled into orphanhood. What’s unsung: the baby egret’s     hunger—orphaned…

Nothing. I can’t construct a sentence able to withholdthe weight of it; I can’t explain or calculate the kind of weightI mean, what it is that I am with or holding. In high school a teacher explained the difference betweenmetaphor and simile in terms of distance. I imagined likeor as as a door cracked, light…

Famished, he did not understand hungeruntil it fueled a metamorphosis. An animal does what he does. A boy, thin and lithe,grows with each taste: his mother’s milk, a crabapple pawed from its branch. Later,a man’s tongue. Come spring, fur meadows his once-pink skin, hangs loose from a belly,from fragile limbs. Soft, love can leave one…