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
Category Archives: Volume 43
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
The Attics of the Sea — John Thornburg
God, last seen in Milwaukee angry, turning rain into coffee waking up rats and the visiting team stranding benches and warm stadium seats. The surfaces of my city turn snow into steam and we, debris, huddle under tenements and towers the wires that connect them, which are the stitches in a blanket of rust. And I went … Continue reading
Gardeners — Perry Thompson
those who never lifted earth lift my son’s body in its sleeping whispered prayers can’t hide the open wound in his chest but i have hidden seeds in the boy so when he’s planted in the ground rebellion will push up like some crazy crimson flower Continue reading
Jellyfish — James Doyle
ordain the beach, little pontiffs in the rolling brightness of their robes. Sacred sand now. The blessed in their bikinis wallow for art among daubs of minor poison, see-through stinging like grace-notes against the sun’s glares, edgings in relief to bring out the Mediterranean day. No one goes in the water before or after the … Continue reading
Coe Review 