by Brenda Mann Hammack
The birds keep dropping
like thick leaves only
to rise again. A truck
scorches by and my eyes
scan, adjusting for depth
and focus.
Yesterday, even the wind took color,
flung itself at my [...]
Skins
Triptych (Sand Mountain, Alabama)
by Chella Courington
i. Portrait of the Artist in Oils
Dali engine
broken
teeth sailing in air
popping eyeballs
lips split
dangle on moon’s ladle
tossing them into
steel bowls
onion
olives
radicchio
streaked white.
ii. Portrait of the Artist’s Parents in Kodak
1953: [...]
My Daughter Asks About Colombia
by Nic Sebastian
and I tell her Bogota in autumn
is drizzle and tramlines until
the Candelaria
the streets become
warm stone they tighten
against cars and all the high houses
have names
we are students in October
in [...]
Advice to Herself at Age Eighteen
by Tammy Ho Lai-ming
She began with a Chinese word: ‘fai’, which means
quick, swift, rapid, or to hurry up. She was
maturing and she needed no helmet from refined
lust. [...]
Doubly Marked
by L. Annette Binder
It’s a river, this darkening disease.
At night it runs beneath your bed.
You hear the water inside your walls,
winding its way down to the foundation
stones and turning the [...]
Mercury
by J Michael Wahlgren
You’re umbilical love— I perceive,
the cupcake of burden, the belt, lifted, hot, Vesuvius-like
I fever. I fever. I fever, You ache.
I’m frail. I’m edge. I’m birthday candle, (she [...]
Hunger
by Neil Carpathios
I sleep and my heart stays awake:
it looks out through the bars of my ribs,
through meat, bones, skin,
with x-ray eyes.
It is looking for something to feed it,
even [...]
From the Bottom of the Floor
by Dana Ress
The poison awful round for round
The sound they spill the counter still.
Not the salt that snows your plate.
No brilliant strokes prepared to fade.
Stones are that, this falters [...]
The Shortest Day of the Year
by Wendy Mnookin
Our doors blocked by a blizzard
the two of us climbed from a window
into a world made new-
mailboxes buried, signs disappeared.
We walked on the tops of bushes,
dug until we [...]
The Sounds at Seventeen
by John Grey
There’s someone screaming in your house.
It’s the stomach cancer, you say.
Your Aunt Sophie has come to live with you.
Or die with you as the case may be.
But there’s [...]
