by Nicholas Johnson Flights to elsewhere are more necessary now that awakening itself is setback after setback as the mutual news sinks through: We both look through a single window after all. The view is bricked and bricked and capped by towers pushing back the sky. The more trustworthy, perhaps, can hold their tongues, but […]
Issue: Winter 2022
10 Poems You Won’t Survive . . . . . . and 10 You Just Might
by Jim Bohen 10 Poems You Won’t Survive . . . the chute won’t open. the oxygen is running out; it’s outer space, no rescue ship. you’re on the list from Robespierre. a new gestapo’s cornered you; it’s only a matter of time. your army lost to Genghis Khan. the bounty hunter “Never-Alive” […]
Sounding Box: a ghazal
by Jordi Alonso for Sarah Azzara Some say they’re three, some ten—most say there’s nine: I’ll be your muse, my dear, if you’ll be mine. Transform a college room into a den of words, silk, whiskey, music, and design. Your heartbeat through a sounding box of bone reverberates through twill and skeins of twine. Who […]
Father’s Day at the MoMA, 2021
by Madeleine Beckman At the Cézanne exhibit – I cried looking at his drawings, reading Cézanne drew every day. He made pencil and paper breathe the way you could – while waiting for me to emerge from ballet class quickly sketching on a restaurant napkin. Some of Cézanne’s work in the exhibit wasn’t good, he […]
Absence
by Chelsea Fanning : the hole in your tooth your tongue keeps probing. : the break in the dust from a mislaid book. : the chair depression where the cat always napped. : the condensation ring on the bedside table. : the steady thrum of a record needle after the last track. : the crushed […]
Lipstick Forensics
by Marjorie Maddox Give me the pattern of pucker clinging so unsweetly to each cock- tail glass of seductive deceit cracked beside a creased napkin briefly branded with blots of Cruel Ruby— no ambivalent Rorschach of lips but this identical XOs match beside a pale corpse with cheeks tattooed so beautifully with the indelible smack […]
Reason’s Retreat Equals An Unsolved Equation
by Kristie L. Williams I asked you to use flyer miles before I am locked in the circumstance of my body betrayed by disabled limbs whose only function is to subtract autonomy by degrees you suggest we facetime while I count random variants on crooked fingers terrified by how my freedoms will be divided through […]
Dreaming for Beginners
by Guillermo Filice Castro let your aunt amble in looking as she did in her 50’s let her return to the front patio of the house she never owned but loved let her talk about past holidays […]
Elegy for Father and Son
by David B. Prather I am my father’s anger, his hands at my throat, his fingers a ring of flames around my neck. The Ohio River catches fire, a glaze of industrial chemicals raging through the night, witch’s hair, devil’s tongue. The hottest fire I know burns in the wood stove. Embers fall and scorch […]
New Orleans—New York
by Carol Alexander Red plums are the bodega’s daily special, at rot’s very verge. Wednesday crowds flow over the hump of bridge & tunnel traffic, delirious greasy smoke. The plums sag, well fingered. Leaning from unscreened windows, children dump dishwater on raku cement. At Greenwood, Brooklyn to Slidell, the drydocked are safely dead. Opaline city, […]