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: Poetry 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
Weathered — Brian Collier
This crop of rain is all that’s touched me this fall. That’s Oregon: soggy envelope of Pacific days stretched over the Cascades’ toothy distance. But what’s distance to a raindrop? I’ve met so many schizophrenics working in this hospital the sound of rain may as well precipitate the voices, the noises that visit the distances … Continue reading
Bone Needle — John Sibley Williams
Sawtooth of crags, raptor nests, and shattered kayaks of ghosts. Down by the freckled young river, born while someone else is plumbing depths of silt. I angle a cow skull on my porch so it can watch the grass unfurl without end. Through its sightless sockets, my eyes angled to be replaced by … Continue reading
Contrails — Brian Collier
Dear afternoon visitor, slipping into the backyard of my mind, have a look-see the sleek, silver fish leaping into my luminous ethernet. A shower curtain’s eyelid, a cosmic veil. Here’s a sharpened paradigm. Or here’s the shape of grace: play dough pressed into the fist of my 2-year-old son standing on a chair at the … Continue reading
We were playing shuffleboard at the Last Chance Saloon when a fight broke out on the tile-chipped dance floor — Brian Collier
to the tune of the guttural rumblings of “Skynrd’s Innyrds,” fists craving communion with jaw, neck, mouths broke in slurred epitaphs of human decency. And then there was you: indecipherably dancing amidst the cacophony of spit and beer, light years away from the fray but maybe feasting on all of it, creature of the wheel … Continue reading
Memorable Cigarettes — John Repp
The Lark I lit to show a girl I wasn’t the boy she’d known, but the tanned, bearded, work-worn man she wanted to light her Larks forever. __________ The Camels & Lucky Strikes & Chesterfields & Old Golds everyone in black-&-white movies leans back with half-shut eyes to draw on, especially Gregory Peck in Pork … Continue reading
Teacher — D. R. James
Then, it was easy to believe the gentle world to be sad. While rereading for class, feeling the old and scribbling a few new remarks in the margins of thick anthologies, heavy as brick —(denying Pope his idiotic confidence in the dumb licking of a gamboling lamb; seconding Ivan Ilyich in all his too-late second-guessings, … Continue reading
Upgrade — D. R. James
“Oh, man, that flip-phone’s toast!” coughs the sales dude at the iStore in the outlet mall before muscling me into an upgrade G. Bell himself would’ve called bullshit on. With a switchblade on a bracelet he slits the copper wrapper of a smartphone that will render me dumb again—my thimbleful of techno- info a nemesis … Continue reading
Coe Review 