Kerrin Sharpe – after my father
after my father after my father the Kommandant read Hansel & Gretel he never left me in the forest or anywhere near his busy factory chimneys he was a true father who obeyed his boss a loving father who kept German Shepherd dogs behind high wire fences some nights he counted stars once when there […]
Diane Marshall – Rotation
Rotation When you’re short, when your DEROS is thirteen and a wake-up, you can’t stop dreaming. You dream of hopping on a Freedom Bird to CONUS, leaving behind bouncing Bettys for round-eyed Bridget Bardots; leaving behind beans-and-motherfuckers in the rain for a T-bone, taking your last ride on a fucking red bird. A fucking red […]
Laurie Klein – K.I.A.
K.I.A. Only tempered thorns can bear beauty’s weight—like birthstones, cupped in the prongs of their mothers’ rings, each a glint. One flash, and shrapnel unlocks the ivory columns of vertebrae, those sacral knobs, the spurs, and hollows. Each of us is diminished: something central caves in, our lungs bereft of even emptiness. We see those […]
Mark Kessinger – Joe in Repair
Joe in Repair looking down where the leg used to be there is only hardware. Something issued. The curved blade flexes like a foot that was once there, bone shaft is now composite, part some of this, some of that, like a ghost bone made from other wounded. What has improved as much as the […]
