Dan Rosenberg – November 6, 2024

November 6, 2024 Fine, America, you found a way to grow apples with razor blades already inside them. To punch new holes through our shared lungs. I thought you were a smudged mirror, not a guillotine blade rising, rising as the crowd froths. But I’m the vole, it seems, chewing a nest of live wires. […]

Amy Small-McKinney – Beautiful and Longing to be Known, Amsterdam and Belgium

Beautiful and Longing to be Known, Amsterdam and Belgium                How can you change the world if you can’t remember the word?                —Eva Gerlach, trans. by P.C. Evans 1. In Van Gogh’s painting the “Olive Grove” his trees are bent and twisted and one a woman’s body the ground below her browns and streaky blacks more […]

Matthew E. Henry – when asked if, as a veteran teacher, I’ve gotten used to it

when asked if, as a veteran teacher, I’ve gotten used to it it says something that I no longer react to a story of a masked gunman shooting up a school or shooting up a church or shooting up a school that is a church or a church within a school or that a pew’s […]

Zachary Kluckman – Chiaroscuro

Chiaroscuro I fill the water with my inky emissions. Invisible life. A heart full of shadows, like Sunday mornings. Brick alley chiaroscuros. I pretend they never find me haunting myself in rain puddles. Never splash myself with dirty water to taste myself. I stopped pressing my tongue to my wounds as a child. There’s only […]

Jared Smith – The Alleys of Home

The Alleys of Home It’s not a game And there are no winners. The scars alone tell you what awaits you. The alley is dark. Waxed papers of pizza roil the shadows tumbling over scraps of Aristotle, Stephen King, soiled pages of the Washington Post. The little light that reaches here reflects from burned out […]