Amy Small-McKinney – How to Love the World, Anyway
How To Love The World, Anyway Except in light rain a body becomes a ringed seal, pinniped, fore-flippers balanced against shore ice, exhaling to empty half-lungs before a dive. Be half-quiet, half-drunk rain drizzling on a body that has decided to love at least half-way. Return to your simple tile floor—real— won’t lift or levitate […]
George Wallace – Hauling Coal in Paradise
Hauling Coal in Paradise you demanded it of us, you shaped our tongues to it, to work it thus, this is our language we know no other, being obedient & hard-working & patriotic you laid it on us, with jingles & charms, threatened denied cajoled, you & your agents, you hooked us with it, pulled […]
Paula C. Lowe – Sourdough Starter / Heal
Sourdough Starter / Heal for the diver who brought the dead man out of the ocean near Anacapa Island Only a backpack returned from Kodiak Island, a shell of you on the carcass of you carrying little hope for bread, your hair painted by Botticelli, a golden wriggling mass salted by an ocean where cold […]
Stefan Lovasik – The Noble Science of Trauma
The Noble Science of Trauma for my wife I shower in the canopied jungle with wires of light and rain; dry with strings of ears and scalps, I step into your body, a mirror. My faces sweat liquid only the dead can give up, yet the mirror rips into a thousand scars, the age of […]
Bruce Bond – Cathedral
Cathedral For three days a woman paints her mother in the chill of the funeral parlor, the doll of the mother’s body open-jawed in the long astonishment that overcomes the dying. God is in the small stroke, she says, the unction of the oil, the aromatic solvent that taints the air. She lays the death-mask […]
