Windchill, the minor key that blows in with the horns Tremolo, a shimmer of ice, the roads we drive to rehearsal Crunchy German, heftig, Plötzlich, the sounds of our boots on the snow towards the hall Six flats, icicles hanging by the wall of clef The thaw of Adagietto— sehr langsam open-heart surgery And, on the way to the garage, our tears freezing for this unfathomable life. Australian-born Katrin Talbot’s collection The Devil Orders A Latte was just released from Fernwood Press and The Square Footage of Awe is forthcoming from Kelsay Books. Falling Asleep … Continue reading Playing Mahler at Minus Twenty by Katrin Talbot→
……………………………………………..Collision risks are growing every year ……………………………………………..as the number of objects in orbit ……………………………………………..around Earth proliferate. ………………………………………………………………………—CNN How can prayers make it through 130 million pieces of space junk careening and colliding at 18,000 miles per hour in an orbital graveyard bits of broken satellites, the remains of booster rockets and wreckage from weapons tests As violence spreads like head lice more and more prayers swirl the skies jostling and jiggling to make it to heaven and petition the Lord please one night without sirens ………….wailing us awake let my daughter learn to walk ………….on … Continue reading Space Junk by Claire Scott→
Satellite Dream Dish Another dream where I’m in trouble for being naked.And the NSA is scoffing at my latest memoir, Songs for Getting Drunk in Your Room. I awake to find it unreal installed in this beautiful field with only four seasons, transmitting messages through space through substances stickier than the concept of God. And when I feel this way I want for my brethren in orbit to send down their fears and insecurities for a change. To set them against the thousands of images taken from a thousand miles away, parabolically schemed to confirm … Continue reading Satellite Dream Dish and Blackberry Picking, 2 poems by Charles Mines→
Do you notice anything? Her comment, laid down like a mark. Often I’m the kid caught napping in a class. But not today. She came home with his haircut, not the soft shoulder flow we found agreeable before. Suddenly, it’s swept-back sides, almost a crest on top. Not even a tight bounce as she walks. Did I forget some part of her? Should I not assume an always tender look? This hair could stare down the police. Always, always I support her choice of cut and clothes with brief remarks. But appreciation as an … Continue reading Now She Resembles James Dean by Eric Forsbergh→
for Caitlin Daughtered with the dogwood’s dirge, we expect love to have seasons, ceaseless in its business of change, inconsistency its own persistence. Gravity and petals disclose the antiromance of an age ahead of innocence. The syllables in neglect are more dutiful than parents. Undaughtered onomatopoetics: the how creak of the floorboards, the could you of stiff hinges, a question mark of dust motes. When the father left, the river branched into three and she took a city of bridges. Maggie Rue Hess (she/her) is a PhD student living in Knoxville, Tenn., with her partner … Continue reading running like water by Maggie Rue Hess→
One mile into my daily jog, New Yorker poetry podcast in my ear, hoping for insights and hardware to Sherpa me up poetic Himalayas, and Mary Karr is reading Terrence Hayes’ Ars Poetica with Bacon, which leads her and host Paul Muldoon, to a number of salutary comments on rashers, including Mary’s confession that she never ever passes up bacon, and that given our genetic proximity to Sus scrofa, eating bacon is a form of Eucharistal sacrament, although as a Jew I’m thrown a bit by the host’s claim, though both Mary and Paul are … Continue reading Ars Poetica, Forbidden Fruit by Gary D. Grossman→
As if to be human is to seek the warmth of another body, ……………………………………………..skin and the course of blood beneath The blood beneath the skin of a city street, how it gives back ……………………………………………..the heat when dusk untethers from the sun’s radiant reach The radiant reach of the heat rising from the skin of the street ……………………………………………..as would any figure of lonely drift and form A form that you meet in the shape of its heat ……………………………………………..and carry into the cool clime of dawn. Ken Holland has been widely published in literary journals and nominated … Continue reading The Radiant Reach of Heat by Ken Holland→
If you can fit the beauty in your mouth what makes you brave, to spit it out or to let the giver of gifts see you make it yours forever? I’m not afraid of disappearing, but Emily shows me all the time that when I make an offer she will accept it until one of us has empty hands extended & the other counts lips as a promise to the bloom. Darren Demaree’s poems have appeared, or are scheduled to appear, in numerous magazines/journals, including Hotel Amerika, Diode, North American Review, New Letters, Diagram, and … Continue reading Emily as She Ate the Flower by Darren Demaree→
he texts me a photograph of the bear scat he found under the chokecherry bush which is bent to the ground stripped on one side of all its red berries but a black bear in our civilized back yard does it mean drought in the foothills does it mean boredom and the need for adventure does it mean the smell of those little red berries can travel for miles or does it mean apocalypse who can say perhaps it means we aren’t alone here perhaps it means we need to clear the vines from the … Continue reading My Husband Texting by Maureen Clark→
When the ceramic tile shattered, I was ashamed I hadn’t cared better for this piece of art created by a friend, one part of a quadriptych. All I saw was the void beneath two nail holes in my bathroom wall, beauty of the other three tiles lessened by more than a mere fourth. When I swept the floor and gathered shards on a plastic plate, I was reminded that all vanity is temporary. We consist of borrowed parts, atoms born in distant stars that comprised a billion things before becoming us. Who was I to … Continue reading Becoming by Bill Glose→
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