Buying one I thought of my mother, dead three months. How she loved the easy peel, the seediness! Long ago on Christmas morning I discovered A tangerine pushed into the toe of my stocking. Loving better the cheap, swiftly broken toys— A yo-yo, a plastic watch—what did I know? Tonight I strip the rind with my teeth. Bitter. Bury the shine in the trash. Tasting it segment by segment I hear the rain Rattle beer cans piled in my neighbor’s yard. In the gilt-covered cardboard box, Mother’s ashes Dream between Ulysses and Invisible Man. One … Continue reading O TANGERINE by Christina Hauck→
We Were Bag People Life is no knock-off handbag, no purse ordinary as any K-Mart pocketbook. No. Worse. Life is a brown paper bag, plainest container, what my father called a poke. Run get me a poke for these beans now. My father talked like a Hank Williams song: Life is a sack of shit sometimes. A&P store bags jam-packed our slumping shelves—our lunchboxes our backpacks our suitcases. Life is utilitarian and pitiful sometimes, papery thin as bird legs. Life is a grease spot in the corner of a lunch sack, stained like a workshirt … Continue reading We Were Bag People and Lament for my Late Cousin While Feeding the Dog, 2 poems by Marianne Worthington→
The way one’s mouth shadows the hand because hands spoke the first language. The way the lurid tongue-tip drapes the sill of one’s lip, mobilizing when hands are elsewise picking knots from shoelaces or rubbing together the neurons of a nuanced thought. How the rushed cadence of fingerspelling paces a deaf friend’s lips. How Moses, heavy of mouth and stammering tongue, lifted the sea with a lightness of hands thrust forward. How a forefinger, pinched against the lips, muzzles a neighbor’s fracas, or the well- meaning, ill-mannered way the hand of a relative stranger cups … Continue reading Canticle for the Hand and Mouth by Karl Sherlock→
Some stories last long past their appointed hour, like light from expired stars. Like leftover houseguests or five day fish. We walk toward remnants of the past like refugees, pulled by the gravity of guilt, the pulse of regret. Is it too late to unspool the alphabet of cruelty, the bludgeon, the blindness, the heated blade of anger? Words cutting like winter-raw wind. Some stories stick like late fall leaves, wrinkled and ready, but clinging to the apple tree like a drowning man to a raft. the drumbeat of regret stranded in the long syllables … Continue reading Some Stories by Claire Scott→
It was late afternoon in fall or spring Because we were not wearing heavy coats. The pale sun was just starting to squinch down. As we left the library for home We lingered on the steps saying good-byes. A man in a brown suit with matching brown shoes, Wearing a shabby sort of fedora, With a full paper grocery bag Crooked in his left arm, a folded newspaper In his right hand stood at the curb, Looking left then right before stepping Into the street. I could not see his face, So I do not … Continue reading Old News by Joseph Kleponis→
How do you bear the middle-aged body, all its longing— …… a body grown round. It doesn’t curve with the same sweetness it did on days when they snapped your bra in the hallway or nights when they whispered, You’re perfect, though you never believed it. The body gives up its wounds too, all the times you said no without words. It’s yours now. You stretch out your arms, turn in scarlet-yellow leaves your heart still hungry in its cage. —In the lowering autumn dark you are here, astonishingly, here. Elizabeth Mercurio is the … Continue reading Autumn Landscape by Elizabeth Mercurio→
1. Regardless of the year, it’s the first flower seen on my daily hikes, pushing through every November’s abandoned duvet of tan and umber—a patchwork of ash, oak, maple, and hickory. I pause, eyelids unspooled, like a tired window blind, and inhale the forest’s green anticipation. 2. Willingly, this could be my last breath— absorbing the effortless geometry of these eight ivory petals, rising from leaves mimicking round Japanese fans from the 1840s. 3. How is it that small perfections can both both break, and reassemble us— as if we were Adam or Eve on … Continue reading Bloodroot in March by Gary Grossman→
one tree- with its small hands and another with its star-laced fingers brush against the sky the sky that looks like a sea drained of water offering its long tresses to the milky moon and the coal-black darkness clothes the sky this, however, does not prevent crickets, from shivering with joy i sit here, thinking of the faint line between life and death while their party thickens and blooms crickets do not carry the burden of making sense of life they lick life here, letting out their song here, letting out their cries IIma Quereshi … Continue reading a cricket’s delight by IIma Quereshi→
Cockatiel, not you, a yellow and orange assertion. Bright with her own meanings, clatters round the outside of her cage, without fear, flourishing her freedom. Her eyes, seeds of darkness, see all that is not you, see you too, see dual worlds, one on each side, her head a ball turret, tail a trailing spear. feather in her cap. She whistles “Whataru?” won’t wait for an answer, explores the floor, foraging as she goes, mounts the top of an armchair renowned for its emptiness, spreads her wings and sings her triumph, not yours. Outside the … Continue reading Cockatiel not you by Sean Lause→
—Magicicada septendecim I never thought I could love you, arguing with leaves under midday sun, your body a prune with polymer wings that look like they might shatter at a touch. When my father told my mother he was in love with another woman, everything breakable flew off shelves, shook loose from frames, fell free from cupboards. I was breathless, my lungs heavy with humidity, a death rattle shaking in my throat, which reminds me of you, your song a pall through afternoon and on into evening. If only I’d known your name was … Continue reading 17 Year Cicada by David B. Prather→
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