By Chad Hanson
Jack bought a waterbed and filled it with a hose from
the front yard. Every two minutes he shut off the
water and added a bottle of whiskey
By Chad Hanson
Jack bought a waterbed and filled it with a hose from
the front yard. Every two minutes he shut off the
water and added a bottle of whiskey
By Mark Jackley
Your silence and then the mild remark
about the weather brought to mind
how people close a door sometimes
using two hands —
one to carefully turn the knob,
By Chad Hanson
Since he retired, Ben has been making toys. He gives them to the kids in the family. This year, when she turned four, he gave a dollhouse to his granddaughter.
By Mark Jackley
No one but the bee,
and maybe not even him,
knows where he is going
as he zips, loops,
pauses to catch his breath.
By Darren C. Demaree
If this were an orchard
how lovely it would be
if Emily fell from a tree
as the mangos fall, roll
By Darren C. Demaree
If this were an orchard
how lovely it would be
if Emily fell from a tree
as the mangos fall, roll
By Chad Hanson
Myers works for a company. He understands the bargain that he struck. Most days a paycheck seems
By Elena Botts
she said,
are you happy. i don’t know that’s the sort of dream
i haven’t yet woken from.
and i said, do the cows in the pasture, do they pray
like we pray.
and i said, when i walk in the cold
By Arielle Greenberg
I really want you the dad I’m babysitting for
to fuck me or rather to want to
bringing me home in your turquoise sports car
babysitting dad will you get me in trouble
give me a story I can tell an afterschool special
By Arielle Greenberg
, the day of Phobias.
Children born on this day will be ugly & die.
You say three years can swallow one moment of a mother
throwing herself against a wall.
I don’t know. I have my doubts,
By Amy Woschek Schmidt
From the nectar I have forged, the hummingbird
is drawn to drink.
By Brian McCarty
We keep one eye to the sky, one fixed on parallel mounds
of tilled red loam. The blood knows
apocalypse, stirs as these new leaves stir
in the late spring breeze. The eye knows
the weather; the seasons become mantra.
By Colin Dodds
Crapping out two days’ liquor and fast food
in the perfunctory luxury of the resort hotel’s handicapped stall,
Spill-O admired the dark wood of the bathroom door
By Colin Dodds
The mirror shows Spill-O bloated and cross-eyed,
all his bluster revealed to be little else
Filled with a rock-solid down-and-out feeling,
familiar from the Fall to this fall, with the leaves
By Colin Dodds
Spill-O’s destination is a rueful interruption
after hours in a church whose confessional is a driver’s seat
and whose altar is the distance
By Laura Bernstein-Machlay
inevitable as poltergeists
in these old buildings
that go on existing despite gravity and entropy
and spontaneous combustion.
By Laura Bernstein-Machlay
On Cass, I think. Maybe 2nd
beside a boarded-up liquor store.
Underage us nuzzling each
a bottle of fizzy alcoholic something,
By Mary Carroll-Hackett
involves pilgrims, not the hand-turkey kind, not the brass-buckled blind bulletin board thieves, but travelers, proselytes, seekers, willing to walk over grassy plains, dry for more than thirty years with scant rain, drought forcing out this parade of the thirsty, stumbling due east across the Altiplano toward the blue white peaks of the Andes.
By Mary Carroll-Hackett
and dirty fingernails, angels, ten thousand of them, living in trailers, canned angels, holy meat, languishing in the Carolina heat, driving up from Kinston, and Shelby, and Bear Grass, and Calico, driving in the vans they bought second hand at Car Coop, headed to the ocean, to Buxton, to Avon, to Duck, for a day, for a week, seeking some sun, and some water.
By Mary Carroll-Hackett
As a child, she could make herself invisible, so wrapped she was in dreams of angels in the trees, and aliens in the cornfield, and becoming Houdini, tied up in sheets she shook free from the bed, begging her brother to bind her hands and feet, so she could show him how they would escape.
By Kathleen Jesme
Nothing of now has a future except in memory where it is washed, pressed,
hung and stored, first in the front closet and then, when that show
has closed, further and further back, so that over time
By Kathleen Jesme
The border was right there a river
another source a permeable frontier one without walls
a stone’s throw to a different country although I never threw
By Aaron Shurin
Tonight he is here, surrounded by wreaths of smoke, or he is a coil of smoke on the edge of dispersal, or I am a smoke machine and he is mine…
By Nels Hanson
I’ve read that every human family has
a smell but prefers the odors of other
families to its own. One butterfly in
By Nels Hanson
Nights, warm still summer Valley dark
unlit by wary farmers’ mercury lamps
touched so easily, supple second skin
By Gerard Sarnat
i. I dwell in an empty chair fantasy behind a barren desktop
except for vacant page after page on which nothing is unwritten.
After a good night kiss on my cot, I’d wish Father might leave the door
By Aaron Shurin
I could see calcium going up against the wind, from my desk at my bedroom window as the typewriter clacked like bones… “Bones,” it wrote, “I sound like bones.”
By Gerard Sarnat
A doc who ministers
to Silicon Valley and Stanford
outcasts,
By Sammy Greenspan
of sudden knowledge — you’re not dead after all —
but here among us, we the living, reading poems
into the night in a little café by the sea.
I turn to a friend: My god, Karen’s still alive after all,
but he tells me No, she’s dead, tilts his head
By Geraldine Connolly
Once I rode a one-eyed horse
To a tree house in the forest.
Once I was a child spreading
Tomorrow’s clean clothes