For Steve Gray, in Sarasota The pine tops burn orange, loud and strange: a train screaming on burning tracks into the full moon. The moon flutes sunlight to my upturned eyes: I am as unable as the stars to look away. The cinder block wall crumbles over the table of smoked meats, fire in the brazier casting tiny orange stars that drift toward the white moonlit clouds. The cows low. And I am crying. I am holding my life together with bubble gum and paper clips. I cannot hear the music coming from the basement. … Continue reading In My Dream by Stuart Gunter →

Lobster mitts might cushion the ache, my hands numbed by these cold, rain-wet stalks. The stakes tenacious, anchored in beds slimed here and there with rot. Cut twine and a vine collapses, limp as kelp. Tug upward and a tired length slips from its dimple of earth dangling a matted root. I weeded, watered, pruned and came to believe I had claim to a red firmness slicing so cleanly it would flake onto my sandwich—I tried to persevere…But the fruit was blighted. The stems now lie in a composting reef—bed of bladder-wrack more fecund than … Continue reading Cold Beds by Michael Sandler →

The Moth It would be too simple to describe its motives as a flame off course, a light mistaken for sun. Loveliness is complicated, a white body against darkness, the night’s counterfeit just beyond a screen, as yet untorn. Pale wing, sees what it wants to see, half-witted and happy for a few wild moments, reeling beneath the cold eyes of relentless stars.   My Neighbor’s Wife Leaves She returns for her things, bright strips of clothing billowed down like prayer flags over boxes. I almost miss the small object in her hand. She hurls … Continue reading The Moth and My Neighbor’s Wife Leaves, 2 poems by Sharon Ackerman →

A once resplendent roan lying on its side, legs flailing, as if it thought— as if, in its final moment it could think at all— that it was still running, wild and free. So disdainful, so high-spirited, breathing patrician defiance with its last sad wisps of breath… Could it have known that its kind master whose gentle sweetness I, a fourteen-year-old city boy, once had longed to emulate, had sought only to tame its wilder excesses, crashing the wooden club down on the very top of its skull, to oppose the highest point on the … Continue reading Beaten by Victor Altshul →