William Greenway – Quarantines
Quarantines i Imagine the media coverage of the Black Death, whole families boarded up to die inside, the comic bring-out-your-dead carts, cameras on location by the mass graves, Shakespeare, the Globe closed, Lear televised to the yokels. Tired of YouTube, my bored daughter draws over and over stick figures with straw hair like the thatch […]
Heidi Seaborn – Burning the Evidence of Our Existence
Burning the Evidence of Our Existence A matchbook lies on the table between us next to the ashtray, dirty with cigarettes. The one we stole from the hotel in Rome, drunk on chianti and moonshine. Drunk on a story we told into extinction. I’m done talking atonally. I’ve emptied my pockets again. What remains lies […]
Candace Pearson – The Twin Bed
The Twin Bed In the austere twin bed, the woman they call “the mother” is dying. The other woman, the daughter in the doorway doesn’t believe it. Impossible to think the first woman would relinquish all control of the comings and goings of the world. The daughter watches labored inhalations; they are twitches from the […]
Marsha de la O – A History of Lament
A History of Lament For mothers who’ve lost children to violence You would never think so, but the detail is movement. Not his body, blue beneath the skin, a severed rope around his waist, the other one fled beyond the high pure cry of geese over Mt. Ararat with its dirty shawl of snow. Yes, […]
Molly Pershin Raynor – You Know You’ve Got Covid Brain
You Know You’ve Got Covid Brain when you realize your dress is inside out / take it off to fix it / put it back on / & then realize it’s still inside out / when you text all your exes try to fan an old flame / afraid a new ember may stray to […]
