Hiding in your amoured shell masked in that red smile which fires even a lame bull you puff kisses that vapourise before they reach me my songs drown in the buzzes of the million bees that trail you and gloss you with their honey tongues you lounge on your hill of ice gauging your worth … Continue reading
Category Archives: Fall 2016
Fall 2016 / Issues / Poetry / Poetry 2016 / Volume 47
He was everything to me, for a brief, blazing time in my life–Nicholas Twemlow
in memory of my cousin, Finn O’Neill We can begin the process of brushing Hong Kong from our shirt folds As it flakes into our wonderful Futureless past. Some kind Remark you made on my elegance Really stuck with me & I’d like to think Everything changed, but nothing Ever really does. That’s so tired … Continue reading
Our Dog Turns Thirteen–Jacob M. Appel
Should we cater a bar mitzvah? We settle for peanut butter pupcakes, pumpkin-bacon crisps. Little need for a fog machine. It’s no birthdate, after all, no anniversary of arrival— just an arbitrary day on the calendar, chosen to assuage our ten-year-old, now eighteen and away at school. Eighteen! That’s forty-six thousand dog days, nested inside … Continue reading
Summer’s End–Cindy King
Night walks on its hands, comes juggling bowling balls and chainsaws. Night arrives hissing in a skillet, smelling of beer and catfish, has yet to meet the box fan since its argument with wind. Night comes when we least expect it, before crickets and sunsets, before clean plates, before wine. The lonely dining room table, … Continue reading
Treatise–Cindy King
Weariness, I feel you coming on big legs, mascara running, boar’s breath fogging windows as you lean on my door. Sleeplessness, I see you pulse behind my eyes, electricity split between body and mind. Restlessness, I smell your sharpshooter bent among bluebells. (What more should I say?) It’s not all boo-hoo in the borough. The … Continue reading
Blog Post / Fall 2016 / Poetry / Poetry 2016 / Volume 47
The Wreck of the Leviathan–Jeff Bernstein
From sunrise to sunset wet-suited bobbins float offshore. Tsunami Zone warnings adorn the dips and rises of the park roads that lead to the long reach of sand. How do those surfers choose? They might say they are looking for promises of a religious experience. Don’t we all believe at some point, impossible to remain … Continue reading
Harvests–Jeffrey Alfier
Our inhabitance: tables that wives set each evening with shallow bowls of Manzanillas olives, conjectures of cumulus anvils in the weather, demands our crops make on rivers we shrink to irrigate the best vineyards of Castilla-La Mancha. Our dreams of home come down to this: brother farmers and their sons we could name on one … Continue reading
Loose String–E. Kristin Anderson
They looked exactly the same— the blue tension, the hall, the floor, almost magically wrapped in lush. Thrones seated sarcasm, too fast, legs trembling. Punch-drunk intuition somehow grinned and I love I love I love— all too high. I want to get down, throw laughter to its feet. Joints pop, hands … Continue reading
Exhibition: Early Maps of the Americas–Stephen Cloud
(a museum docent speaking) The mapmakers must have let magical thinking guide their work, hearsay and conjecture shaping the newfound lands to match their desires and fears. Just look at these illustrations, how they construe an interior replete with precious metals, cannibals, chimeras, and rough beasts. Some cartographers, following Columbus, located Eden, the lost Garden, … Continue reading
Replacements: Christmas Present, Christmas Past–Tony Tracy
Once again, the Douglas Fir is hauled out of the basement, a steerage muscled, drug through narrow confines of the sheet-metal furnace and the squat, empty cavity of the deep-freeze that hasn’t been filled with butchered goodies since Skogland’s Meat Locker went bankrupt in ’09. Verdant synthetics are then pulled apart, sectioned to maneuver the hard … Continue reading
Coe Review 