If you want a free lunch, All you have to do is smash, bleed, and work for it. Would you like some peanuts for lunch? Free sample, the sign on the wooden box says. Take one. Inside the box with the sign, behind the broken glass holding them in place, the peanuts lie stacked, delicately pressed and balanced against the edge ready to tumble on the first move. To eat them, you must first smash the glass, and hope your hands don’t bleed. Disturb the system, and hope none cascade onto the floor, so that … Continue reading Trick of the Eye: Fresh Roasted by Richard Elliott Martin→
Stealing Japanese poetry requires great skill, almost Ninja-like stealth, especially at night when there are so many poets out viewing the moon and, in Winter, the snow. But it’s best not to do it then because your tracks can easily be traced back to the scene of the crime. In Spring there’s not enough leaves to hide behind. But if you wait until Summer, when trees are fat and thick with green, then it will be hard to see the moon when it first rises. And always be careful in Autumn— the haunting sound of … Continue reading Stealing Japanese Poetry by Robert Harlow→
Teaching, too, is labor. Everyday to be up to the task, everyday the master of a hundred worlds, of casual words, and of causal words, to confront the faces added to or taken from. Do you know when you add a thought there, it shows in the eyes, it shows in the mouth’s subtle creases? Do you know, when you stop a thought, when you turn it aside with a straight line, with the shortest distance from there to here, it shows in the brow’s labor? Exhaustion. Do you know that teaching is exhaustion, everyday … Continue reading Teaching by J.R. Solonche→
SUCHNESS Unable to find a bait station, the termite guy says Call me when you’ve trimmed all this. I say It’s supposed to be this way, a cottage garden of its own making and movement, a profusion that sees beyond any preordained order. He sees only thorns, a cloud of white climbers disappearing the stone path. So much suchness is good for the soul. Lord, I’ve tried to tame it, but let me not try to suppose where or what it should be but its own labial pink, its own gallop across borders and walls. … Continue reading SUCHNESS and DITCH LILIES, 2 poems by Linda Parsons→
This moment demands my attention. Tiny turtles, vulnerable as polar bears, bubble up from their sandy womb, struggle towards light borrowed from the moon, dropped onto the sea. I spend so much time surrounded by concrete, cars, and catastrophe that birth in the wild startles, like the moment fine wine trips over the tongue and without instruction, awakens the palette. Human tragedy tramples parts of the world I can’t find on a map and places I can drive to—just down the road where home-grown shooters kill en masse, shielded by the 2nd Amendment. Just look … Continue reading One Moment Along the Food Chain by Marsha Owens→
When you add cream to your coffee there is a moment of storm beneath the surface, the possibility of a sinner planting a kiss on the gates of heaven, a string of cloud floating in the old well before the clanging and swirling spoon drains all of our hopes into the great brown ditch. And yet this kind of hope can only live in a moment. The young communist’s dream before Stalin’s moustache crawls into his trousers, mercilessly scratching his thighs; the trust of the promising acolyte before the moat-like grimace of a priest separates … Continue reading Cafe con Leche by Benjamin Schmitt→
Tucked in her shell of gutsy metal, an errant art teacher spun my car into a snow bank. We shook after the collision, the grab handle, Jesus, pried loose, sun visor dangling like a hangnail from the inside roof. The glovebox archives our road lives, talismen from preschool classes, cassette tapes and their magnetic cellophanes spooling loose, expired disability placards lodged behind the tissue packets. The passenger side door was crinkled, discarded- candy-wrapper-style, and the back of my head felt like mayhem and grind. She didn’t see me turning right, despite my right of way, … Continue reading First Car Accident by Alisha Goldblatt→
The lilacs hid the remains of a porch it used to screen. The hints of joints and steps leading up and between. Stone remnants of a foundation, a house that used to be stolid and presentable to the world. Flush with flowers, the branches bending low, bowing under their weight, I waited, too, shifting my own meager childish weight, from one foot to the other, sifting through those parts of me solid and true, walled in by my imagination, as white-washed walls rose back into view. The air heavy with its perfume. My head … Continue reading Jack Gilbert Keeps Lilacs Alive in his Head by Deborah Doolittle→
They’re up on the branch tips, all eight legs en pointe— one hundred and four chitinous arachnids, their tutus matching leafless twigs. These spiders parse every gust, like surfers scoping wind and swell; desirous wind, wind strong and constant, like the hot custard disc of June. When it blows faithful, they hoist their buttocks, as if spiders actually had buttocks, shooting life-lines of silk into wind—wind, now a sculptor’s hands, patting and twirling the silklines into a sail, or is it a parachute; aeronauts lifting into the air as if west was the only … Continue reading When the Spring Winds are Strong, Wolf Spiders Balloon by Gary D. Grossman→
This year my credit card company sent me a birthday card. In simple red, white and blue it wished me a happy birthday from Credit One. It is nice of my credit card to put the effort in to send a physical card when an email would have done it. My mom sent a text. My credit card puts the work in. It knows how to rupture and repair. It gives double miles at thousands of convenient locations all over the world. My credit card is senpai Uwu. I’ll never have to ask for it … Continue reading Maxed Out by Jason Montgomery→
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