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→
Last night I called you. Moon sharp, I said, like an important message. Look up. The sky has opened its story and shined its shy star. It’s a pearl plucked from the deep. Look up before she hides before we forget the oyster, that we are surrounded by sea. Mary Christine Kane works in healthcare marketing and lives in Minneapolis, Minn. She holds an MFA from Hamline University. Mary’s poetry and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies including Bluestem; Mutabilis Press; Plainsongs Magazine; The Buffalo Anthology, Right Here, Right Now; and others. Her … Continue reading Message by Mary Christine Kane→
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→
The pulpit floats high above the chairs. She cranes her neck to see, twists a little clockwise to hear. The priest’s suspended there for his flock. Which soil to avoid? Which rock? The Bible’s chained to the lectern, each page a work of art. Needles of heat. Through the window a cloudless sky the blue of Mary’s cloak, a furnace of crows relentless as her fears of hell, of dying alone, that her prayers court a God who needs no one. Elisabeth Murawski is the author of Heiress, Zorba’s Daughter, which won the May Swenson … Continue reading In a Chapel Near the Loire by Elisabeth Murawski→
Not every deed in the annals of my family was given an account. It could not be. But the gospel writers and eyewitnesses each translated experience and recollection to collections of their own. I protected as if genocides were being sprayed from trucks in the living room and cessations possessed my hands. I have planted them in earths they were not potted in. The tender greenhouse became their new home: soils in life they were never rooted in, earthenware pots that drain and breathe and reverse their suffocations. May I plant you (uncle, aunt, mother, … Continue reading Not Every Deed by Tom Gengler→
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→
In the darkening slush of afternoon traffic, he unfolds a chair beneath a lone sycamore then urges his body into its crooked shape. Always at this hour, even as rain slickens Elysian Fields, he sits and outwaits the sun as if for someone to return, or the familiar judgment of a voice grown marble smooth. Something from the street calling to him, urging him to rise up from the green lawn and chair, He might have been carved out of air, he seems that content, as it he’s waiting for the reflections of a chrome … Continue reading The Old Man by Richard Weaver→
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