A Meal in Honor of Someone Once Beautiful My God. Preacher, pass the silence. Stop talking. The whir of desperate voices cloud thick air, fill our glasses to the brim, shocking one empty chair before flowers, china & shroud. Enough is enough. For heaven’s sake. We squeeze as twisted thread. Passing through the eye of sorrow’s needle making our way to the far side of this dread meal of death, bread & wine. Bent fetal. Enough is too much. Susan Cunningham is a therapist and poet. She holds master’s degrees in education as well … Continue reading A Meal in Honor of Someone Once Beautiful by Susan Cunningham→
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→
Fence for Margie She built that fence in the snow. All we saw of her was her red anorak and the upward flash of her tool, a hammer. Later, after her husband died and we tried to visit she wouldn’t come to the door. Now all that’s left is that fence, weathered, sturdy, still barring us, though she has moved away. She took her dog with her but she left the dish behind. Now, it sits there like a bright blue plug. We think if we remove it the whole yard may swirl inward, … Continue reading Fence by Corey Mesler→
Being Me The Trip across Texas is mine. Well, it’s in my name. The bank picks up the tab, I grab the fantasy: he practices my autograph in a cheap motel like a kid does Mickey Mantle’s. His girlfriend is horny, pretty and young, naked but for an anklet with chain linked to a ring on her toe. Her thighs are tattooed with flames. He says, “Wait one Goddamn minute,” goes out to test my card on a carton of Camels, beer and a convenience store rose. “YES, YES,” she shouts applauding his success. … Continue reading Being Me by Thomas Michael McDade→
Accidental Stowaway from Singapore, no papers or passport, surname unknown, Short-tailed Babbler, Japanese White-eye, Orange-bellied Flowerpecker, whoever you are, passing passerine, drawn to perch on a lifeboat winch by some crumb or flash of an earring as tugs yank the ship out into channel and two days later, in the South China Sea, you’re stuck too, nowhere to flee from here to horizon, as shown by forays of fluttering panic over the waves and back before exhaustion drowns you, little prisoner, condemned to be transported to a dirtier city, or if you hang on … Continue reading Accidental by Stephen Cushman→
Lover’s Quarrel 1 Because you cling like cigarette smoke, thin and acrid, in the brim of my hat, as if you know God lives on the addiction of our breath. 2 When the shadows finish wallpapering the bedroom, and the crows flock east with the traffic, is when. 3 How can I watch, in peace, the city bathe behind the sheer plastic shower curtain of the rain? My eyes towel off a nakedness not ours. 4 Because it’s late, and we know it will all expire, and I’ve programmed the wind, an oscillating fan, … Continue reading Lover’s Quarrel; At the Intersection by Stephen Hitchcock→
Voices I would be sitting there idly twirling the strawberry perched on top of the plump red pincushion while she was hunched over the singer filigreed foot pedal making rhythmical clicking sounds as sky blue fabric folded in creamy waves under the needle mother’s voice soft and dreamy answering someone only she could hear a revelation to me that anyone else could have a surging inner-life when I had always assumed each stitch every sigh was meant for me alone Janice Bowen says, “When poetry found me, I was lollygagging — leading an easy … Continue reading Voices by Janice Bowen→
Katie on Fire Sunset and silence, chocolate bars and coffee— Katie fingers rifle shells after dinner, stacked in rows and flicked the way a child does dominoes. These mountains have a way of messing with one’s marbles, loose, scattered…sometimes spilled. She had banked on babies, and her husband holding still; got busted fence instead, scattered cattle, a cold bed. Tomorrow— ten inches of new snow twenty degrees, and another dog to bury. Peach blossoms in April— she can only dream pounding the floorboards raw pacing off caffeine. Fresh butter beans, strawberries ripe and dirt … Continue reading Katie on Fire; Just a Drip by Dan Bieker→
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