Julia B. Levine – On the Vireo Nest Atop Your Wire Brush
On the Vireo Nest Atop Your Wire Brush When you find it between boxes on a shelf beside the house, woven with hair and shoelace and twigs, I am in the garden, watering lettuce we planted in August, green spears of romaine translucent in November’s side-lit sun. Wet, the soil smells like spring, like the […]
Charlotte Muse’s In Which I Forgive the River, Reviewed by Lee Rossi
Charlotte Muse In Which I Forgive the River Broadstone Books Reviewer: Lee Rossi Parable, fable, fairy tale: when a moralist wishes a lighter touch than your typical sermon or tirade, lighter even than allegory, she resorts to stealthier forms of persuasion, familiar to the child in each of us. Charlotte Muse is such a moralist, […]
Joseph Hutchison – Mindfulness
Mindfulness The young buck lies down under my window in the shade of the deck above, the knobs on his budding antlers furred like kiwifruit. Now and then a ray of sun slips down between the deck boards, makes the fuzzy antler tips shimmer like that quick-wittedness the buck will need when others of my […]
Christopher Shipman – Fog of Tongues
Fog of Tongues Once upon a time words were beasts. They stalked the things they named until they became those things. Fog stumbled behind. We lived and died in the direction of words— a religion of everything unsaid. Not an image named. Only sun and shadow— that violent blur between moon waxing gibbous moon waning crescent. […]
Hannah Seo – Nocturnal vanishing act
Nocturnal vanishing act The best way to fall is to sink, a seltzer tab dropping into a tall glass of water, gravity slowing, bursting into fizz. Feel the lightness of a sheet, the soft skin of a hand, the darkness of the night a gentle, heavy pressure. When you fall as often as I do […]
