The sock-eye, the painted deer, the Sisyphian dung beetle come here to die while still fat and horny, sucking up the wheat and the mold, the yesterday and the story of the giant beaver that gazed across a thin river but wouldn’t swim, so it sat there bone dry and wasted until everyone laughed and … Continue reading
Category Archives: Volume 44
Prayers — Savannah Cooper
Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. I have broken crayons and called names to faces that looked too much like mine. I have hated my reflection—not the hair or the shape, but those stupid, sad eyes. I have built rickety structures not even on sand, but on the thinnest of breezes. Bless me, Father, … Continue reading
Kaolinite — Caroline Lauth
Your calloused, clay-worn, perfectionist’s hands molded a delicate bowl and when you deemed it ready you fired it in a kiln, not pausing to think that perhaps kaolinite is happy being dull, and porcelain resents being fragile, and I, I do not need to be molded into something beautiful or better, and I, I do … Continue reading
Face — Alexander Boyd
My Séance with Toulouse-Lautrec — Noel Sloboda
A Three Minute Response to Mary Oliver — Joyce Janca-Aji
Somedays I spend all day watching the tiny jumps of pulse under winter skin so white, almost translucent as if it were a sheet of ice under which rivers dove downwards as if to crack the hard shell of the earth’s core and recover a sense of ancient molten life. Continue reading
An Introduction to Algebraic Coding Theory and Alzheimer’s Disease — Zach Wood-Doughty
Twenty-One — William Spencer
poetry is just nothing on the tops we’re warm and our touch is acceptable these final moments, worthy of documentation, can tell primer from paint by smell that is how to be a good communicator wake in her house and the smell of home improvement like a hometown of ladders girl so it continues only … Continue reading
Punishment: The Dryer — Kevin Griffith
Perhaps a mob job. But he tumbles on “cotton,” heat seeping through his cringed eyelids. He could think amusement ride, he could think kid playing astronaut, but it’s no fun when the lungs sear raw with waiting. And even if he could somehow kick or punch the porthole door open, what would lie on the … Continue reading
Punishment: The Pet Gorilla — Kevin Griffith
Rather than fierce: Pathetic. Lies on the couch watching reruns of Kolchak. You remember the day you got him—Xmas. A box big as a refrigerator’s. Mom and Dad? Strangely absent. But once the ribbons and glittering wrap were gone, out he lumbered, yawned, and plopped—down—like a servant too old to be of use. So you … Continue reading
Coe Review 