J.C. Todd – Night Vision
Night Vision after Käthe Kollwitz, preliminary sketch for Schlacterfeld / Battlefield, sheet 6, Bauernkrieg / Peasant War, etching, 1903 It’s their first night dead, ripening where they dropped across crop rows of rye. You sketch their bodies with black crayon on a common stock of paper. Your uncommon eye, Käthe, searches the slaughter field for […]
George Wallace – Drinking Rice Wine
Drinking Rice Wine drinking rice wine is sweetest by a winding stream with old friends and pipe tobacco in early October – every winecup filled to the brim; every winecup floating equally downriver. George Wallace is writer-in-residence at the Walt Whitman Birthplace and editor of Poetry Bay Magazine. He is the […]
Francine Witte – The Bones of Us
The Bones of Us Holding us together. Our skin is cosmetic and thin. We gather together at work and on buses. We hold paintbrushes to form portraits of each other. It is possible to live your life backwards, you, emerging full-formed at birth, only to undo everything, year by year, skin slipping slowly away. And […]
Sean Thomas Dougherty – Poem
Poem Not to write like a hammer to a nail, or a nail in the word. But to write like the memory of the tree. The tree remembering the rain. To write the rain. To read the wood. Sean Thomas Dougherty’s most recent books are Death Prefers the Minor Keys (BOA […]
Blake Lynch – The Disappearance of Language
The Disappearance of Language The dead don’t need words. But pigeon is a nice one. A word can be warm— but can it pack boxes? Pay rent? Joyce left. Eye patch, pipe smoke, Dublin rain in his coat. I sold the apartment. He got famous. And Finnegans Wake— what a nightmare. What good is a […]
