It was midnight of our last night in the cannery, and all twelve of us who had been assigned the fish house had been working since seven that morning. All day and into the light-filled night, we had been cleaning […]

Stevie Nicks
 
Under the strobes
guitar hands, neon blonde.

She sings like a forty-year-old child,
wears a witch’s cape.

Tosses back her jukebox tenor
to the audience.

We stone up,
all the freaks in […]

Conveyance
 
Between the bones of the plat
and the sale of our land, so much needs

to be done to make the title clean.
The deed marked what everyone knew

then—the creek to the quarters
to the gr […]

Then I Returned to the House of the Slow Letting Go
 
I went out into the evening,
walked alone with my clippers
to dead-head the marigolds
the peonies, no longer spinning planets,
and the now brown-leafed […]

The view from the bus station was disappointing. All I could see was the traffic on Calliope. That, and the bottom of the Causeway, all concrete and metal, darkened by decades of weather and exhaust. The fall air […]

I haven’t seen Dave this excited in months, since before our son left for college.

“We’ll see a compressed version of Arnold’s life,” he says, sprinkling his fingers like falling fireworks. “Can you imagine? Yo […]

Sometimes he dipped his popcorn into his coffee. He only did that when the popcorn was burnt. Today, it was the coffee that was burnt. The popcorn was soggy. But it was breakfast. The same breakfast he had eaten […]

Links of Ladder
 
Higher than a hired man’s head,
a chain bubbles from the tree’s heart
and falling thirteen links, dares
a boy’s reaching, his pretending—
its original purpose unknown.
It is not a hanging […]

The Paperboy Sees No Wonder in It—
the Snow Giving off the Only Light at 6 AM
 
The boy could have lived forever
sliding down a hill, after watching cartoons.
Now the only cartoon is himself fa […]

losing the word
 
what is prayer

but our limbic words
offered
to an uncertain
trajectory,

the cave images
given language
from our dark cities.

i remember your prayer
outside memphis
whispered […]

We lived in a very small town on Eastern Long Island, closer to duck and potato farms than New York City. But my parents believed that it was important to see beyond the local environment and travel was one of the […]

I’ve never seen my father cry. This is surprising because he’s not one of those “boys don’t cry” sorts and never scolded us for tears. With four small boys running around the house, he saw ours almost daily as […]

by Laura Marello
Three years ago I phoned Specialty Exterminators in Lynchburg. My side yard, viewed from my screened porch, was starting to look like a cheap horror movie: rats, mice, and baby mice, running from […]