After-Xmas industry. In neighborhoods, crisp cedars and spruce pines hyphenate curbs. A pasture fronts the orphanage, tempers grid of brick dorms where crews toil with life-size figurines of an ornamental nativity. An ensemble donated by Sears & Roebuck in the 70’s like gold tensile or corporate myrrh – fully amortized / no retail benefit at the mall. Bedded horizontal on a trailer, the plaster statues murmur in route to out-of-season storage: a devalued host of sojourners relegated to an outbuilding. Not a stable, not a fable, but dry font until next November’s advent – reverent … Continue reading Dismantling Bethlehem by Sam Barbee→
From however far away, detail. The lovers, almost fully clothed, amid bushes, her round blonde face delighted, hopeful. The returned Prodigal, kneeling, embraced, exhausted – such precision of apology and joy – but seen by whom in the middle distance, that fascinating distance you don’t notice? A bystander, a passerby who stops to take the scene in wholly. As in Christ Presented to the People so they may choose between the thief and him: steps, platform, doorway, every window full, spear-carriers, hangers-on, all known; and Christ, thorned head down, looking tired, as one … Continue reading Rembrandt Etchings by Frederick Pollack→
The best ones are the small ones, those you need to hold in your hand two or three at a time, those you need to feel for size, and shape, and heft, the blunt, the sharp, the smooth, the rough, the square, the round, the firm, the soft, the ones like rocks, like bricks or stones in streams, the ones like clods of soil or clumps of clay, the ones you pile to build the whole world with, and then the ones you hurl to bring it down. Nominated for the National Book Award and … Continue reading Monosyllabic by J. R. Solonche→
It’s working all of us, and all the time. Not just as obvious obsessions with diagnostic names, the car-horn ones you notice corralling someone else as you avert your eyes. Don’t be coy. Punding hums to you and me. Collect. Arrange. My mother took up figurines, blaming the Depression for her want. Myself, I go by color, size, or function for my stuff. The superego interrupts: “In this implicit way, are you not sorting people with a glance?” Eric Forsbergh’s poetry has appeared in Streetlight, Artemis, JAMA, The Northern Virginia Review, The Journal of Neurology, … Continue reading Punding by Eric Forsbergh→
A day of forgetting has its price, but a price that can’t be reckoned, because the receipt itself was shoved into a pocket, soaked in the laundry, tumbled in the dryer into a hard pebble of paper, a symbol of nothing specific enough to reconstruct a story. And what was purchased is like candle scent settling throughout the house, seeping into fabrics— curtains and couches, lampshades, sinking through the thin space between floorboards, until finally it’s so diffused there’s no trace of its floral ribbons. Which is why a day of forgetting also has its … Continue reading Handout by Michael T. Young→
Atheist At seven I stopped believing in Santa after Mary Lou whispered to me betrayed by adults lured into an unreal world I stopped believing in the tooth fairy with her late night dimes, the Easter Bunny with jelly beans and pastel eggs and God But I am not a good atheist I slip into the back of Saint Anthony’s some Wednesdays at noon and sit in silence with the stained glass saints I read Simone Weil, longing for her unwavering faith if we ask our Father for bread he does not give us a … Continue reading Atheist and Not Now, Maybe Not Ever, 2 poems by Claire Rubin Scott→
your father is dying on the other side of the world and yet, the moon shines into our bedroom my mother has broken her ankle and can’t walk the stairs and yet, the moon dances between clouds our daughter, plagued by night terrors, sweats in the sheets between us and yet, the moon fills our room with brightness our neighbor’s mosque was vandalized, dirty messages on the walls and yet, the moon glows over both vandals and vandalized tonight storms rage over violent seas, and fires burn across our hearts and yet, the moon holds … Continue reading and yet the moon by Nimisha Mondal→
During my older sister’s annual visit last fall, three shoe boxes came into the house with her luggage. After the usual greetings and settling in, she opened the Florsheim boxes to reveal a postcard collection. In an effort to clean out her Tennessee Victorian, a closet shelf having collapsed the week before, she decided she didn’t want them anymore: would I be interested in them? History is always a bit surprising, especially when close to one’s personal narrative. Imagine the archaeologist who digs up an artifact that totally alters the theory he has been working … Continue reading Writing History’s Happenstance by Fred Wilbur→
From the branch above, half concealed in new oak leaves, silent, the barred owl watches with giant eyes, round as the pool at my feet. Its body, is all of a piece, no indentation even for a neck. If I could reach high enough, my fingers might stroke it in one long move from head to base, flat-handed, barely a touch, feeling the slightest tickle of feather, like the way, as a child, I’d kneel by the mud puddle, hover my hand over the brown water, lower my arm bit by slow bit, trying to … Continue reading The Owl by Deborrah Corr→
Mounds of sugar beets under halogen, marooned in pressure waves like fossil dinosaur turds. Lurid thunder eggs. And always the two Lebanese brothers who walk and argue. . A six-year-old boy drowned in an irrigation ditch. His father a tethered dirigible in white Adidas. Church is headstones in hill rows wearing in an unrelenting … Continue reading Parma, Idaho by Craig Brandis→
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