Carolyn Oliver – Soon Enough
Soon Enough I’d like to lick dew-bedecked daylilies and phlox, larkspur and cosmos. This morning the milk thistles heave their shadows up the painted hill. Someday dew will seem a mercy meant for our machines, our mouths. Mercy tastes like nothing except the barest petals, just insists we feel. Carolyn Oliver’s […]
Hayden Saunier – Deepening the Course
Deepening the Course I drag a booted heel through thick creek gravel, dredge a ditch to keep storm water pouring off a swollen pool from washing out the lane, then wait to check my work. The murky stir sifts down into a sudden galaxy of tiny eggs—white shine of dots afloat in separate jellies—appearing briefly […]
Bruce Bond – Coyote
Coyote Elegy for W.S. Merwin I knew a man who cut his chest each night to let the animal scamper out, alone, and sniff the corners of the dark, until it had no corner, no harbor, no name, only an aurora of smoke about the creature whose breath shadowed the emptiness, so long as the […]
Heather H. Thomas – The Boat
The Boat Are we in port or moving? my mother asks. We’re in the dining room of her assisted living. She’s lost her story but found this one. In port or moving? She reads my incredulous face. Time, history, and now, place: vanished. Soon gravity will be defied, if she can avoid falling. Forget it, […]
Chad Frame – Drawing Up the Papers
Drawing Up the Papers I’m standing outside in a three-piece suit on my lunch break from work between two cars, holding replacement copies of papers giving trumped-up titles—Executor of the Estate. Power of Attorney. In the strong wind, everything is flapping. Now I am the Fate who measures the thread, I think. Now I am […]
