Street of My Life Street of my life, I have left you and I have returned, wandering nights in your renovated future, The deed has passed into my keeping, and the dead, ever gracious, have agreed, to pretend they have never left. Short, unexceptional street, lined on both sides with two-story brick houses, Each with its painted stoop, pouring bruised-legged children down the stone steps, With its flower pots, its wooden bench and iron-fenced “garden,” large enough for a single flowering tree a row of crunchy-leafed bushes, And the last house with its Florsheim … Continue reading Honey and Six Poems by Sharon Leiter→
Temple Age Sycamores phrasal, ashen, strap, bi-chromatic, this cross-hatched, argent patch of woods. Respond with hard answers, please. My season is upon me. Green in there somewhere, yes, even red, if I hash around? Goodbye beauty, I might also say. Depart loveliness, at last. Passing by pallid fields, I confess I dreamed of us. Precarious weeks, these, yet you never want me small. Or parceled. Rather all. Little Song Who dies but once? Evening bears the brunt of incinerated prayer, endless as a tale unsnared by denouement, in closure small as the … Continue reading Temple Age by Lisa Russ Spaar→
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 graveyard; they agreed with a handshake and the natural boundaries quilled in red. No one recalls, so imagine those lives in metes and bounds. On the bank they pulled fresh water, broke ice in winter, carried evening hymns over the field to the arms of the great oak. And now we see encroachments, bramble, the soft roads … Continue reading Conveyance by Julia Kudravetz→
Dickey Ride Three hours north of Augusta, the music pumped through our car speakers asks on repeat Don’t you want a dickey ride? Don’t you want a dickey ride? I must admit I think I do, only what I want is akin more to that James Dickey, canoe down a river, drunk fun voyage, something action, some adventure, but not even that. It’s the ride I’m in now, four friends in a Ford carousing around Rabun, North Georgia chanting mid-90s rap to mica-lined rocks, them shining back like broken disco balls, sort of a … Continue reading Dickey Ride by David Moody→
Desert Desperado “Sometimes a person has to go a very long distance out of his way to come back a short distance correctly.” —Edward Albee What I wanted was a resurrection of love a love bearing all the gravity of one’s lifetime What I remember is being dead for all purposes the glint in my eye a sore memory of hope and regret Nothing else visits my imagination at this time the heavy smell of urine transforms any moment into being 28 and caught way beyond redemption strung out two nights in a squalid concrete … Continue reading Desert Desperado by Cara Marinucci→
The Missing Sugar of 1981 The footloose villages of her own probable Argentina have been meadowed now and pastured. She’s a gutter-cat licking the bakery window. The storage space her brain built flooded. If you didn’t know the river, you might think it doesn’t bite. I’m speaking of intentions now in an old suit worn like moss. I can’t wave goodbye in Spanish or collect branches, water roots, prune envy. Gratitude doesn’t live here. The cat’s still pretending to be just a cat. The yellow wolf of uncertainty comes calling. You don’t even trust … Continue reading The Missing Sugar of 1981 by Rich Ives→
Invitation to an Empty Church In the rafters: hungry, silent mice. Down below: the civilized ask light to forgive them mediocrity. The light they seek is a cage in the rafters above glass stained in saviors, where holes fall from holes in the ceiling. The women pass coins onto plates like brooches to grandchildren who will never wear them. Someone knocks at the sealed door but won’t be let in. Nobody remembers how they entered or if light ever completes. A great voice asks the windows mirror-questions, and we pretend we haven’t lost our … Continue reading Invitation to an Empty Church by John Sibley Williams→
I Was Born Too Soon After I was born in a crowded chorus of blizzard gusts, combing the darkness ten tiny fingers (one for every day I hung around the womb past due). I breathed in my mother’s grief, humming through skin and limbs, and we shared the electricity of your ghost, your face descending in swollen vessels circled tunnels, deep and long, honey thick and just as slow moving from her heart to mine, the one still forming. And when the hospital lights won out my leathery defiance, I searched the … Continue reading I Was Born Too Soon After by Alison Schreck→
The Universe May Expand Forever The fan blades spin large in your pupils, imperturbable peepers as a pilot’s. I am reflected in the corner of your eye, feeding you, and we are just mesmerized, aren’t we? Your thousand-yard stare to my closest attention. As you gulp the last drops of formula, I look down a glass telescope into your gullet. Past the curled tongue and pink gums, I can see you expand across your body from a radiant of light therein. Your vessel, something so small and still that your warmth nearly burning through … Continue reading The Universe May Expand Forever by James Fishwick→
Between Worlds for Margie Her arms flutter, as if to flee her body, the milk glass hands skimming sheets like autumn wings: thumb and fingers open and close, perhaps to pluck a word, sometimes pointing to say a name or spread into a trembling fan as lungs surge inside her chest, the way that burst of sparrow, trapped on my sun porch, charged the frantic air, beating, beating against God’s hard light. Wavering Place I’m slowly bringing things back, … Continue reading Between Worlds; Wavering Place by Diana Pinckney→
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