Poetry
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Ghost Species by Jillian Wasick
We were wrong to spurn the Neanderthals. Too fast we followed the first man who cried savage, his fingers pawing skull, and the scientists who nodded yes without looking side to side. I read this in a magazine left open, an issue from last year, when we still closed our days with the same turquoise…
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The Singer by Shannon Wolfe
Alan’s songs still echo from the basement of the house. Gingerbread, pink, sweating like an old southern Baptist lady in the forever sun. The willows on either side fanning, their shade more illusion than testament. Gil speaks to me in the quietest tones as I make my way up to the tired porch, painted icing…
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Two Lovers Sitting at a Table, Drinking Coffee by Jamie Avery
Give me your gentle mornings, your seashells, your palms. Lend me your wine-stained mouth. In the early light, speak softly. Tell me: Where’s your favorite mountain? What shapes do you dream in How old were you the first time you realized you’ll die? Were you scared then? And what scares you now? Give me your gentle mornings, your seashells, your…
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11:34 PM by Jamie Avery
It begins the way most things do, meaning you are late. When you fluster into the bar your stomach is growling and the honeybees in your chest buzz with nerves. He buys your drink. You say, Thank you. There are gaps. Pauses. You are both treading lightly, but the beer is helping and soon you…
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After being hungover and facedown in a wildflower field in an unincorporated town outside of Fresno by Kelly Egan
All the tiny stems are popping right back up from where my body has just been alleviating my concerns of killing what I’ve just recognized, intimately, as a world. As a world they go on by themselves. As a wild they do not easily succumb. Which brings us to an ethics of picking them— At the moment such a gesture is the…
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My Estuary by Dana Delibovi
The highway droning. Soot settling in. Thunder, then rainstorm. But not refreshing, because heat was envy spread across the green harbor. Jagged bottles. Wide concrete stanchions in the dark mud. Smell of low tide. Smell of dripping diesel and sharp envy, the wide bay covetous, our house leaking in silence. Money still evading the heat. The highway pointing and laughing; the harbor mute,…
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The Pulse of the Bluegill in the Thawing Lake by Dana Delibovi
rippled water waits for frost over blood in the star-crusted darkness clear craters of the moon muscle cells green grassy banks constrict release constrict stubborn Being on unlit roads acorns ping prodded from oak branches by embryonic buds midnight spreads a tablecloth with white cups of hot milk the miracle is that anything ever dies Dana Delibovi is a poet, essayist, and translator. Her work has recently appeared in After the Art, Apple Valley Review, Bluestem, The Confluence, Ezra Translations, Linden…
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Hatchling by Temme von Lackum Dedlow
The hen’s tidy pillow of warm down has gone to mess shell fragments and pin feathers and clumping shavings three chicks out and gone and a single, cold egg left: a failure, we call it, to hatch. I set down a lone tick mark in the grid. A soggy summer afternoon, we are damp in our mosquito sleeves; damp in…
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the small i by Saramanda Swigart
this is my country look i overturn the junk drawer of my white/middleclass life and take stock rifling i find i am not a capital letter anymore first person singular has shrunk wizened down to that apple core i found beneath the car seat last month or that ivy there, brown and dead because i killed it the waxy leaf tree outside the front door (the…
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An “epiphany” moment of my poetry writing by Xiao Tan
You said you like lingonberry juice, not for drinking but for a little color in glassware, glittering. I pour a drop of lingonberry concentrate into water, watching the little ruby diluting to reddish, to almost nothing. Nothing, just an old moment with You, glittering. Xiao Tan was a teacher and a writer in China who moved…
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