Let me tell you uncomfortable I am with silence. I am handcuffed to a joke I can’t tell. Two crows are where my lungs should be. My exhales are the shape of birds. This is serious business. This is an average Tuesday. Finger in the light socket. Fork in the garbage disposal. Recycling bin blown over by the wind. The week’s detritus spread out for all the neighbors to see. I’m hungry but all my knives are too dull to cut anything. The voice coach said sing from your diaphragm. Someday I’ll have an office … Continue reading Same River, Different Day by Patrick Meeds→
My memories of the time when my parents and I lived in a renovated gristmill are of course dim—I had only been two when we moved there and four when we left—but they are my first memories, and they are filled with tone. I remember the narrowness of the house, with two rooms on each of its three floors, and the oldness, darkness, and coolness of its log interior. I remember my mother’s shiny stainless-steel percolator in the basement kitchen, and its swish-and-gurgle pattern that sounded like labored breathing. I remember the kitchen stool, which … Continue reading Talking to Toads by Tutt Stapp-McKiernan→
…………………………………………………….A poem is never finished, only abandoned …………………………………………………………..–Paul Valery In a downtown daze I trolled among towers reeking of success, rising proudly into the sky, and between them found an alley of orphans, all my incomplete gestures, children who made and dismayed me, never found a home in my heart. They fled the disregard to which I condemned them, banded together, unselfishly shared their pain and painkillers, and admired each others deformities. They tattooed my ink into their fists and waited, one-eyed and one-armed, (the eye full of spite, the arm heavily armed), hoping that … Continue reading Reckless Abandon by Dudley Stone→
My four-year-old granddaughter, “Zoe”, lives out-of-state. We often meet via Zoom. She and I share a screen and explore her burning questions by searching YouTube videos. Last Saturday morning, Zoe wanted to know: Do unicorns exist? Are mermaids real? We discovered that unicorn sightings might have been skinny rhinoceros or possibly rare Italian one-horned deer. We also learned that mermaids likely were manatees basking on boulders and the wishful thinking of sailors who had been at sea too long. This news didn’t crush the child. A week later, though, when I asked what she wanted … Continue reading Deconstructing Unicorns and Mermaids by Deborah M. Prum→
My wife and I sought sanctuary by the lake, our two sons in tow. The four-hour car trip was nonstop requests for candy, cookies, sodas laced with anticipation, halted mid-sentence by the lake’s incantation: the first glimpse of cool, limpid waters and a sweeping lawn of conifers. We sailed among lake islands, swam alongside fish, dove for seashells among undulating stems of pondweed. One son claimed Lake George looked just like last year, emboldened as he sailed a Sunfish, while the younger insisted it was different every day. This was before we returned with his … Continue reading Lake George in My Heart by David Stern→
It is just after 5:00 a.m. as I browse among the books that prop up my life. I say prop because books are so often a means of leaving my surroundings, tuning out, turning off. I say prop, but more accurately, they are the existential nail on which I hang my time and effort. Poetry, mostly—Ron Rash, Ted Kooser, Wendell Berry, Kari Gunter-Seymour. Mountain words, plains words, red clay words, river words. Places where I am utterly myself and utterly absent in this fading night whose silence is suddenly shattered by the rattling of a … Continue reading Visitatio Divina by Sharon Perkins Ackerman→
My grocery store is under siege by sleepwalkers who show up in pajamas moping from shelf to shelf for a precious memory. There is no one to guide them. Disposable employees are with- drawn or unhinged; I saw a clerk slap a senior shoplifter to the floor. The butcher who knew your name had a gentle funeral. St. Rita’s warm quiet bells called the old neighborhood together. Almost everyone wore their best. I watched it online in a suit & tie. Deli-lovers from bygone eras filled the pews with greetings & non-greetings. Neighbor-strangers are faux-blind. … Continue reading Shopping by Paul Joseph Enea→
She is a large woman. In another place or circumstance, she would have been the woman in the flowery housedress with fluffy mules on her feet. She would have been the lady you always seem to get stuck next to on the bus when it is hot and crowded and everyone has to hold onto the strap. She would have been the one with the smelly armpits. But she fits no clichés. She has money from sources unknown. She has a style so cosmopolitan it makes your teeth hurt. She’s always waving. Hello. Bye-bye. … Continue reading Adrienne by Lisa Ben-Shoshan→
Once mown a tedder spreads the murdered crop to dry, draws a swath, a windrow waiting. Three days of drought and the hay is fit to bind. Catch and stack. Catch and stack. Breathing diesel, dung, and latent threat, a shirtless boy, fourteen, the mud of field dust and sweat, scratched by each bail’s blades… until you’ve built a plinth above the wagon’s rim to stand atop — prince of something. Stand there rut-bouncing ‘till with one lethal bump, your hay mountain shakes you off. You hit the ground and roll to meet the … Continue reading Harvester by Ned Kraft→
Nigerian artist Sefunmi Adeola puts his sharp eyes to work as a photographer, illustrator and textile designer focusing on his African people. “I became interested in photography around 2014/2015,” says Adeola. “At the beginning, I was very interested in street photography and abstract street photography. I studied the works of artists I admired, looking at the tone, color, themes, and image-making. “I was utterly fascinated by the black and white images of artists like Ralph Gibson, and Rotimi Fani-Kayode as well as Sunmi Smart-Cole, Robert Frank, Robert Capa, Annie Leibovitz, and Diane Arbus.” Adeola prefers … Continue reading Sefunmi Adeola’s Focus on African Subjects→
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