Amy Small-McKinney – Wildfires & Other Catastrophes
Wildfires & Other Catastrophes In the meantime, I’ll tell you about words & their meaning. How my father screamed at me/to the world. How I blistered/was I wrong? “This is America, not Poland.” Don’t confuse fire with other devastation. Look for definition. Fire: Carbon dioxide, water vapor, oxygen and nitrogen, combustion. Zyklon B: Main component […]
Introductions to Pedestal 85
Introductions to Pedestal 85 Selecting poems with four editors is an amazing process. Working as a team helps each of us look deeper into the intent of a poem, into its rhythm and impact. So, readers, I’m going to issue a similar challenge to you. Find the poem where a woman is buried in books […]
Iain Twiddy – Winter Weight
Winter Weight Who might know, some snow-god, possibly, the weight of those Hokkaidō winters: I mean, you could calculate it, based on a mean six meters of snow, knowing the weight of one cubic meter, and the island’s surface area (just over a fifth of Japan’s total), then times it somehow by time, half my […]
Roy Bentley – Richly Robed Rhinoceroses Riding in Rickety Red Rickshaws
Richly Robed Rhinoceroses Riding in Rickety Red Rickshaws —Graeme Base, Animalia My mother had brothers murdered in Appalachia. Men that other men knew they had to shoot or fight all night long. I couldn’t keep straight who shot who. My mother told me, more than once, to get it right. And so I made a […]
Jeff Bagato – Contesting the Homeland
Contesting the Homeland En pointe, à pied, the soldiers pirouette across no man’s land, cutting entrechats over barbed wire loops and the remains of comrades potted deep in mud; his foxhole abandoned and gaping clear, that one saddest private took the barbs with a grand jeté; arms curling his head, he joined the ballerina battalion— […]
