Category: Poetry
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I THINK YOU SHOULD NOT LET THIS TORTURE YOU by Miriam Milena
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…
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PERIHELION by Ben Kline
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…
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INCOMPLETENESS THEOREM by Eleanor Stanford
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.…
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THOUGHTS ON EVAPORATION – A ZUIHITSU by Sarah Mills
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…
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LULLABY* by Tran Tran
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…
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I CONSIDER WHAT TO SAY WHEN MY DOCTOR ASKS ME TO DESCRIBE MY PAIN by Emma Bolden
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…
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HYPERPHAGIA, OR FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE by Matty Layne Glasgow
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…
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Two Poems by Margaret Wright
Memorial who’s awake right nowin Utah this cinema of long hair, God in undergrad, youngest cousin in the youngest lake, we’ll bring a baby next time, my sister says, we’ll bring a kid, & then we drive away thinking about aunt becki, todd, black hair,…
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BRUSQUE RECITAL by Christopher Brean Murray
A scarab beetle steeps in spruce shade. “Vast and inhospitable” is how his vision was described. The urn was unearthed in pristine condition. “Beware the maelstrom,” she said with a smile. I realized the gorge was behind the house. The seminar was long and exclusively cerebral. The party: brief and mood-altering. Do you remember the…
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SORROW by Megan Pinto
Everything lost is returned again in sorrow.Love lays to rest in a dark glen of sorrow. Handsome men study their faces in glasstemples I built, saying amen to sorrow. My fingertips turn violet under cold water.I read this as omen when I am in sorrow. Tiger moth, peacock & devil’s butterfly stunned behind plastic by children…
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I AM THE GRASS OF THE WIND ALLEY by Sarah Riggs
From The Heart Weighs In, a Revolt I am the grass of the wind alley, the tepid stream of bird song, the glint of reasonable doubt, the threat of the last hour, the smile of the still falcon the quandary of mourned daylit webs. I am sun auburn-flecked shells I am childhood and old age,…
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SELF-PORTRAIT AS IT SINKS IN by Kenton K. Yee
“65% of Americans believe they are above average in intelligence” – 2018 NIH article The throat aches, a cushion pinned by years of acute flounder bones. Remember, we’re all as accidental as nectar palms living off light the golden tuba woofs down during its daily glide across the blue cotton field of gulls and contrails.…