She’s wanting me to know how her twin stepsons, after losing a Little League double-header, took baseball bats and busted all the reflectors in every grain truck parked in the lot along the tracks near the Farm Supply at the edge of town. Who’d do a thing like that? I’m waiting for a burger, … Continue reading
Category Archives: fall 2015
Young Father—Lowell Jaeger
jerks his boy’s arm, nearly lifts him off his feet, drags him out the restaurant door into the parking lot, where the kid gets three open-handed swats on his tender backside. Now the father squats eye-level with his son’s tears, brushes his son’s hair back and hugs him. But I’m making this … Continue reading
Blank—Gil Zamora
“I’m afraid that I can’t,” he says. He looks at his reflection in the window while I am talking. Snow falls inside of him. Distracted by the spectacle of ice in the air, he pretends to be conducting a dance of falling. I want to say I know. Or I want to say you can. … Continue reading
Blog Post / fall 2015 / Featured / Issues / Poetry / Poetry 2015 / Review / Uncategorized / volume / Volume 46
Rehearsal—Lauren Bender
You’re the blur of boundary between pot and plant. You are a madness that moves, too motherish. Taken down into the basement where the music is, where the colorful crystals are. You careful-like lift out containers of take-out, I scratch myself on purpose by accident. The TV crackles and smokes and burns the powder. Someone, … Continue reading
Blog Post / fall 2015 / Featured / Issues / Poetry / Poetry 2015 / Review / Uncategorized / Volume 46
The Ocean Carries My Message To You—Melissa Parietti
The tides created all the races; The snapping fish, their jaws are bones varied width, shape and bite by their want; the great wanting. (It comes to you right now) A greater warning for tomorrow’s uncertain perils, the terrors of another’s fearsome jaw. You swallowed me whole. Inside of my every nerve-ending I … Continue reading
Blog Post / fall 2015 / Featured / Issues / Poetry / Poetry 2015 / Review / Uncategorized / Volume 46
Epidural—Derek Sugamosto
I. For a long time after the fact, I pretended to be the jilted lover, scrambling through the mad fits of romance toward the repose of therapy. A hot, hot light was our love, for a matter of months, a light that cast the laying of limbs as a similarity enforced. Winter strolls toward the … Continue reading
Blog Post / fall 2015 / Featured / Issues / Poetry / Poetry 2015 / Review / Uncategorized / Volume 46
Not Quite an Angel—Seth Jani
I am angry that I have never woken up And not known how I got there, That I have never disappeared in the dead of night And stayed missing for days on end. I am angry that I have a heart Prone only to aches and emptiness And not that savage flaming … Continue reading
fall 2015 / Featured / Issues / Poetry / Poetry 2015 / Review / Uncategorized / Volume 46
Drought—Gary Metheny
A distant shelterbelt of cottonwoods boils at the edge of a cornfield that waits to be cut for silage. Arid gusts rattle withered corn leaves ringing with the screaks of red-legged locusts. Ladybird beetles cling to the wild roses that stagger down the slopes of empty ditches. An old woman toddles past the empty barn … Continue reading
Blog Post / fall 2015 / Featured / Issues / Poetry / Poetry 2015 / Uncategorized / Volume 46
Glutton’s Prayer—Randel McCraw Helms
Bathe me in ale, soak me in froth, Give rivers of whiskey to swim in; No time for women when rum is on tap, And oceans of beer on the side. Fill me with collops and gobbets of flesh, Stay me with flagons of wine. Give me to gnaw on glutinous gristle And I’ll … Continue reading
Blog Post / fall 2015 / Featured / Issues / Poetry / Poetry 2015 / Review / Uncategorized / Volume 46
Ornithologies—James Mc Elroy
And in those days the ptarmigan will become as white as driven snow … Stirs a few speckled ovals @ high elevation and promises shell-shock, survival. Each egg is as seismic as it gets inside a world of dwarf willows, lichens, mosses — moorland fruit. And, then, in a split- … Continue reading
Coe Review 