Joie Filippini – Taste
Taste I imagine one day I feed my mother soondae or japchae and like magic —something in the glass noodles, in the nutty doenjang, the spicy sticky blood, a spell unwinding— memories of her small self —before Jacksonville and Toledo Louisville and Kalamazoo, before her tongue was pulled out and she knew the taste of […]
Marion Boyer – All My Flowers
All My Flowers Antarctica I know ice whalebone white green and turquoise, milky ice, ice blood-red when the algae blooms; candle ice, pack ice, pancake ice, and cat ice that glazes water so thinly a breath would shatter it; lolly slush, loose crystals in a salt-water slurry; young ice and its false maturity. I know […]
Lynne Knight – Centering
Centering Copernicus made some people understand that the words sunrise & sunset were only metaphors, & the idea of the sun rising & setting an illusion. The holdouts thought him mad, apostate, but he persisted. Legend has it that on his deathbed, he awoke from a coma, saw his just-published book, & died in peace. […]
Dane Cervine – Koan of the Blue Heron
Koan of the Blue Heron …the brain’s neural circuitry for aggression seems dangerously cheek by jowl with the neural circuitry for sex. —Carl Sagan, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors Aroma is language the wild body knows, the come hither, or I will kill you of scent glands. Not just at the pick-up bar, back alley, war […]
Ann Hudson – Basketball
Basketball My father nailed a basketball hoop to a catalpa tree beside the shed, a growing tree which in a handful of years would raise that rim far beyond our reach. No matter that dribbling was improbable in the dirt and roots, the glossy, brown catalpa pods crunching underfoot. My sister flung a heavy ball […]
