Rain, and a fight with an old friend. Sober, which makes it worse. Nothing taken back. You keep drilling, can’t stop. Into the molten core. Rain sizzling in the hot spittle. Rain on your bald head. You’d look ridiculous duking it out in the street, laughing police grabbing you both by the ears like schoolboys. … Continue reading
Category Archives: Poetry 2012
Ice (Zlatar, Yugoslavia, 1985) — Jim Daniels
We sit outside at the splintery picnic table where Uncle Stefan gets hammered daily since he lost his teaching job, his students carrying him home drunk one last time. Aunt Nada pours commie coke from a dusty bottle they’ve been saving. I don’t know what nada means in Croatian. Nothing in Spanish. She pockets our … Continue reading
Current Issue: Volume 43, Number 1 — Poetry Issue, Fall 2012
Cover Photo by Alison Charles. Being All the Bus Drivers Simultaneously, An Argument for the Twentieth Century, Walt Disney — Daniel Poppick Turning Early, Ice — James Daniels Leaving Men in the Midwest. Or, She Dreams She Slips — Lynn Lifsen Taxidermy, Bret — Jill Whitehouse Barbed Wire ,Electric, The Cat on Page Ten — Sioned … Continue reading
Nostalgia for a Valley Unseen — Terrell Jamal Terry
Some part just wants to move like powder, and go where no other’s prying punctures a private instinct of whispering when sounding out the names. Dangling dusk colluding with green. The reduction of complexity forms a clearer understanding, as an after smell of rain wrung out hovers above the heart. Eyes cut lines to meet … Continue reading
Province Elevated — Terrell Jamal Terry
Start with the moon. Do you know where you were when rumors of a death of days ahead spread like glass splashed? It was tempting to skip to an end. Sparse by degrees, broad acres burnt by the rusty sun. Goodness forgive us. I am living, was all you would say. People thought it to … Continue reading
Light Empowers — Vinati Bhola
Opulently perched On the horizon’s vista There resides light blithely. Look! How the night sulks, Accepts the defeat, walks out barefoot, Genuflects lithely. Continue reading
a centuries too-late letter to Paul from Tarsus
Why don’t you relax a little bit, drop the pen and forget the letters. oh, Paul, haven’t you ever Seen a woman with her hair down, arching her back like a sleepy cat? it makes circumcision feel so Unimportant—all this angry ink bled over a third eyelid when you could be over another body, inking … Continue reading
Leaving Men in the Midwest. Or, She Dreams She Slips — Lyn Lifshin
away like magic marker ink in the rain before it’s too late, before she stays in cities like Madison or Oshkosh—watch out in Minneapolis, in Green Bay Stoned on the lips of men with stranger verbs, with nouns like Dude and, Alike, dreaming from a bridge a poet could jump from, 16 arms around her, … Continue reading
Train Atlas — John Thornburg
“the music in this town,” says Leo “is too fashion conscious for me.” His business plan involves opening a hotel in which all the rooms look like subway cars and vibrate pertinently with lights that move past the windows. At the front desk you have to turn in your clothes and they give you old … Continue reading
Good Weather in the Domain of Queen Mab — John Thornburg
1 You find Tina outside with cigarette breath. She challenges you to a winter foot race out to the sledding hill and back and you accept the air thin but prickly like thistles and thorns by the time you have to jump the fence your shoes and ankles are soaked if you lose she’ll give … Continue reading
Coe Review 