Jeanne Wagner – Vocabulary Lessons
Vocabulary Lessons At thirteen, I look up bruise in the thesaurus, like the bruises on my best friend’s arms and legs, and I find contusion. Later I check innocence and discover naiveté, a word that fits her when she tells me her father never beat her when she was younger because she was such a […]
Jared Smith – A Heavy Weight to Carry
A Heavy Weight to Carry … the average cumulus cloud — often called a fair-weather cloud — can weigh around 1.1 million pounds, according to the United States Geological Survey (USGS). Very foggy this morning. The road outside my home is slick. There’s a lot of water in the air and leaves are budding. I […]
Olga Livshin – 2023
2023 When a war flares abroad, American sky smooths out, erasing the small scars left behind by airplanes: we are now extra soft, extra large. American oxygen, twinkling: Little accomplices, you luxuriate under my protection. The sky has gentled my head so many times, I have nearly learned to check my disgust, not the news. […]
Jennifer Isaacs – Subjacency
Subjacency (linguistics) A constraint on the movement of elements which states that the target position of movement must be structurally close downwards to the source position. –Wiktionary … lying immediately under or below. –Merriam-Webster the incomparable syntax of the knee the half-familiar language of the hands the mouth’s vague symmetry we spoke a new and […]
Ken Holland – How Quiet the Words
How Quiet the Words You lean towards me the way a whisper leans into intimacy or how rain strips the sky down to no other purpose but its own. I know no more of you than summer knows the dark eclipse of its heat when the earth wanders away from the long light like a […]
