Joan Colby – Earthworms
Earthworms Digging in the loam For nightcrawlers, fat and rosy, Until the pail is full. We haul them home Caked with the dirt they aerate. One child shows another how severed They become two creatures. Brilliant! he exclaims. I explain this is not actually true Which they choose to ignore. Threading the worm onto the […]
Rob Carney – “Tell Us a Secret”
“Tell Us a Secret” When night’s aloft and the sky’s torn up, someone’s brother has to journey. Half to, half from, half until doesn’t matter as long as the myths aren’t skipped: the gold cup, the hovering firebird, the path to the lake. This is lightning, and it wants a story. This is summer, and […]
John Bradley – Found in a Hollow Book Covered with Cilia
Found in a Hollow Book Covered with Cilia A moist, anonymous brawny brain on a bed, a soft, red, brainless bed in a room with no features, no feathers. The brain, without a mouth or visible speakers, addresses you in a pleasing, unaccented speech: I appear to be defenseless, and yet I am not quite what […]
Sara Backer – I Think They Are Crows
I Think They Are Crows About a hundred flying in the green-tinted zone between slate sky and vanishing half-sun. Parked cars grow black fuzz. The world mutes. Their flapping wings are grand pianos falling. My heart twists as I brace for the crash of soundboards splintering with Beethoven, Mozart, Gershwin, Tatum, Monk—destroyed in a final […]
Introduction by John Amen
Introduction by John Amen One of my first & most enduring literary impressions re the catastrophic impact of war, on the individual psyche & society at large, is the example of Septimus in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. While S occupies relatively little text compared to narratives related to Clarissa Dalloway & her looming party, he […]
