Antonyms for “Affluence” It is a myth that mice are impossible to eat. I see my tuxedo on another man, a groom or musician. It is a myth that the bride will be thinking about Queen Victoria or the General Washington. It is a myth that I will get fat doing this. As a child, I knew I would marry Gretel, and we would never sleep soundly. I understood that the witch’s candy house wasn’t real, but the children’s hunger was. How to Buy an Antique Picture Frame Sometimes you have to drive …..hundreds of … Continue reading Antonyms for “Affluence” and How to Buy an Antique Picture Frame, 2 poems by Glen Armstrong→
As the East’s Songbird Epidemic Fades, the Cause Remains Unknown ………………….—Audubon Magazine, September, 2021 Fifty thousand starlings swoop above the marshes, wings drum in unison, roar in the crepuscular sky. Black shapes cluster, shift and swerve, entanglement at play, then coalesce, morph into a snake with twitching tail, then giant cells that merge again, give birth to prehistoric forms like dancing aurochs on cave walls. Roman augurs read these signs to interpret gods’ desires: when to fight, when to wait, what the cause, who escape. What sibyls now can tell us why songbirds fell, … Continue reading Reading the Signs by Patricia Hemminger→
Shadows His light bulb dims, and it’s dark enough for shadows revealed. A surprise every time. Strangers rush from nothing to a glittering blue pool. Ships resemble chess pieces from the mist of a balcony. Dock leaves on nettle stings. A lie in a fortune cookie. Paperbacks and Polaroids line the shelves of the bookcase, collected like porcelain angels on a Catholic’s mantelpiece. It’s all a Kodak distraction from being born of bone instead of what gods are made of —-shadows and celluloid. His mother’s still alive. With curlers in her hair, she’s framed on … Continue reading Shadows and Bird of Youth, 2 poems by Joseph Monaghan→
What man would not look back when claiming a celestial voice commanded him to go away from pleasures of wine, games of chance, lust, secular music, dance, art, poetry? The men who deny life’s gifts and joy, who kneel and coerce in the name of one unknown, unseen, beyond reason or proof, men who control by unified power and fear deemed it so that woman should not turn lest she turn to a pillar of salt. The greater choice is to turn, to escape the clutches of piety and power at any cost, becoming salt … Continue reading Salt by Les Brown→
feels this way. Familiar like the abstract place you grab for when you’re curled in despair on your own kitchen floor begging to go home, not knowing where you mean. No matter whose hair and breath lend the other pillowcase its scent, which farm grew this squash so delicately sliced, whose face you lean toward, lips to their ear, cupping a joke. No matter which gone person you scan the crowd for year after year. Whitney Hudak is a CNM and poet living in Newport, R.I. Her work has appeared in Burningword Literary Journal and … Continue reading Each Year by Whitney Hudak→
He looked small, curled up on her couch this handsome boy/man not looking at her picking his fingernails jiggling his foot a whisper of a beard on his face he was silent she waited he cleared his throat, said he had the same nightmare every night dreams of carrying wood up a mountain, walking with his father who he trusted more than God walking with his father who he loved more than God Dreams of an altar a fire, a sacrifice did it really happen? were his hands really bound? a knife at his … Continue reading Therapy Ten Years Later by Claire Scott→
Bukowski talked about it, the one he threw through the window each drunken night and it still played, a radio indestructible with songs that couldn’t help but bead against my forehead. I think of Johnny Rivers, honeyed in his tenor and hair, the way he sweetened even “Secret Agent Man.” Edgar Allan Poe sat with Bukowski throughout those drinking sessions. What- ever he poured down his gullet had to burn like being tied to a stake, when the Raven began talking Plutonian shores. As a young man I remember summer nights of cheap vodka, … Continue reading A Radio with Guts by Russell Thorburn→
The garden bridge, a subtle arc that gathers to its bend the mossy stones of either bank, and to the water lends a stagnant symmetry: the dark tunnel above, the sky afloat below. A tranquil park made upside down, and I, half over, pause upon the brink to watch the willow send its branches heavenward, to drink the light that never ends. Now speak the truth. No shallow gloss will shelter us from moss or earth. Michael Quattrone is the author of Rhinoceroses (New School Chapbook Award, 2006) and the musical album, One River … Continue reading Reflection by Michael Quattrone→
Swimming Again to Meet You, along some enclosed lane where I pass you swimming in the other direction. Decades, I swam into changing light that guided me to temporary rest— So I begin again— the long drive in the northbound lane, up the highway to the farm. Returned to your house, I let myself down into the water of our lives where you waited, cooking, looking for my car crossing the creek bridge. I leave and return, leave, return, and always, there you are, wondering how I manage to do everything I do. Who is … Continue reading Swimming Again to Meet You and In Mist and Gray Light, 2 poems by Roselyn Elliott→
In school we learn to lie down in the face of Evil from the skies. “Take cover,” the first commandment during air-raid drills as we duck under our desks, then “All clear.” No one dares to say that with or without these precautions, if a bomb fell, we’ll all be toast. All day we wait on the edge of seats for firehouse sirens to sound the alarm. Part of the Civil Defense system, we Boy Scouts chop trees, clear brush for a circular space deep in the Poland forest, use the logs for an … Continue reading The Cold War in Poland (Ohio) by William Heath→
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