Any normal, pink-loving little girl uses every shooting star, fallen eye lash, and flickering birthday candle she has wishing for a knight in shining armor with a pony she can ride into her fairytale sunset. It’s hard to tell a five-year-old that, if she’s lucky, she still has 80 more years of life left and happily-ever-after … Continue reading
Monthly Archives: January 2013
Aging — Ann Niedringhaus
I close my fingers, try to grasp water. The tighter I clench, the faster it runs away. The April 15, 2007, issue of The New York Times carried a headline: Aging: Disease or Business Opportunity? I have long read obituaries. They change as I grow older. Now I take inordinate comfort in those for the … Continue reading
Glum — Michael Milburn
You know those vanished cars forgotten about until one spring day an anonymous tip sends the cops out to a newly thawed local lake to winch the wreck streaming to the surface? That, I’m told, is what it’s like to get a smile out of me, my expression a wintry landscape, manner stiff as a … Continue reading
Selected Letters — John Azark
“I’ve never written one,” my daughter laughs as I hand her the selected letters of Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia O’Keeffe, a tome as heavy as her laptop. “It’s only Volume 1, they exchanged 25,000 pages in their lifetime! Imagine making that kind of effort even in love.” “Never,” she says, “too bad they couldn’t text,” a … Continue reading
Pavlov’s Dog — William Miller
What happened to the poor beast? Did he slowly starve to death, still barking at bells that never brought a dish of food? Or did they feed him just enough to keep him alive, prove the experiment worked again and again? Maybe he escaped. There were city streets, garbage cans to eat from, until he … Continue reading
Robert Johnson — William Miller
It wasn’t the devil who taught him to play guitar, sing the blues in a graveyard of broken headstones, weedy grass. It was an old black man, a sharecropper who owned one pair of faded overalls, a six-string brown box. And he chose this place to pick and moan for the cool night air, the … Continue reading
Epiphanies in the Form of Birds — Rob Schultz
Epiphanies in the form of birds, Athena’s owl, Aphrodite’s doves, their light—gravity—how humbling anything with wings like hands lifting and a voice that sings, not one’s own, but an articulation outside coming in that points to another other than self, to the invisible. It is insistent, urging, repeating itself, almost apostolic. It is nurturing, emptying … Continue reading
Brother Swartzentruber’s Market and Novelty — William Jolliff
The gate is wide that leadeth to destruction…. In Elmer’s store the coolers run on kerosene, the black straw hats are apostles from China (dat’s a good buy!), and his County Seat Gazebos come assembled or as kits, delivered to your door by Elmer’s younger brother, Hershel, the wild one who left the Brethren when … Continue reading
Feed the Need — Matthew Laffrade
Feed the need lie some more and build Lies upon lies upon lies become tangled Thoughts astray become unglued in Wallow of emptiness a hopeless romantic A fiend feed the need more & more & Exponential growth of nothingness I love and long for the nothing of the soul Crushing fleeting feelings of lost nights … Continue reading
a handbook to dying on a 3 mile island — Brendan Moore
I’m in love with a Nuclear Reactor— Did I tell you? At least he will hold me With nuclear arms, And our kisses will be Plutonic— Clean even in waste. So when I am in love, It seems I’m radioactive— When I make love, I’m in half-life decay— A body deorbiting a red reactor, Which … Continue reading
Coe Review 