By Alex Carrigan What is your purpose here on Earth? If only that were easy to tell. It’s easy to tell if you only knew how important the seconds before the answer are. The seconds before the answer are the last chance to rethink the steps that brought you to this stage. The steps that
By Barry Wallenstein He says – to whom I won’t tell – it’s a tick past midnight, not enough time now to read, not enough hours ever in a day. He speaks that way and stumbles into an iamb, curses in spondees – unable to finish a verse or worse, he falls silent Blocked in
By Corey Mesler Death is a needle that sews your last thought to your best day and you are thankful for some- thing to wear in the after- life. Corey MeslerCorey Mesler has been published in numerous anthologies and journals including Poetry, Gargoyle, Five Points, Lunch Ticket, Good Poems American Places, and New Stories from the South. He has
By Patricia Powers Said my eleven-year-old While eating her cereal Le monde va mal Yes ma pauvre The world is going bad I tried to hold it off The way the invisible moon holds off the white cloud crash of a wave The way a cloud holds off the heavy suspended droplets of
By J. Chester Johnson What separation? I know it when darkness sheds Its faintest glimmer. What elevation? I know it by its likely Descent and laughter. What resolution? I know it exists somewhere Between once and now. J Chester JohnsonJ. Chester Johnson is a notable poet and nonfiction writer, whose recent books are St. Paul’s Chapel & Selected
By Vicki Iorio Fire summer, when the house sparked and the cats died, my daughter and I drove the island from Gatsby’s North Shore to the fish forks, pinballing in traffic to avoid the smell of burnt bones. Joni, mandatory music in the car. My daughter, seat belted and buckled up learned my life did
By Susana H. Case And among the bits of leftover lava that nip at her feet because she didn’t heed instructions to wear enclosed shoes, she secretly scatters the ashes of her mother— illicit without permit—who always loved vacations in Sicily. The wind, sharp as slag, throws itself against skin, and it makes people swarm
By Kendra Whitfield -after Chris Abani It has taken me forty years to understand: You wanted to go as much as we wanted you gone. There is no shame in truth. Only in the lies we tell to make others less uncomfortable. I haven’t slept through the night since your body was found – I
By Richard Levine A barking arrowhead of geeseshot the moon on a rainy night.Warm and dry in our dreams, we heardtheir barks and wet-feathered crossing,and shivered and held each otheragainst their miles of drenching risk. They could have been war or climaterefugees, fleeing from the ruinsof once happy, fruitful lives.Or like us, glimpsing ourselves inshop
By A.D. Capili “President Duterte said kill the addicts, and the addicts died. He said kill the mayors, and the mayors died. He said kill the lawyers, and the lawyers died. Sometimes the dead weren’t drug dealers or corrupt mayors or human rights lawyers. Sometimes they were children, but they were killed anyway, and the