#69: Poetry by Gale Acuff
SLAIN Death is something we live with all the time my Sunday School teacher says after class and she could’ve said it before class, too, I guess that’s her point or part of it and for that matter she could’ve interrupt -ed class to make it, but she didn’t, but maybe by not doing that […]
#68: Poetry by Roy Bentley
THE DAILY SEDUCTION OF BEING THIS PERSON INCLUDES KNOWING MY MOTHER LOVED ME Ray Charles singing “You Don’t Know Me” aside, you can know someone. Call it experience him or her or they. And that being true, I feel the daily seduction of being this person and how it includes the information my […]
#65: Poetry by Joddy Murray
LONGEVITY, BRIEFLY No grass is as rooted as Bermuda with its beard of roots mingling like sentences in the filth of clarity. No song has as deep regrets as anthems trumpeted off of rock-face scabs, plucky decay that this day sounds as dim as sugar. You greet whatever rain comes with a smirk, the kind […]
#59: Poetry by Yuan Changming
WOMAN-RADICAL: A FEMINIST LESSON IN CHINESE CHARACTERS 妇：lady is a woman who has overthrown a mountain 好：wo-man spelt as one word simply means good 妙：young women supporting each other are always wonderful 嫁：to marry a man is for a girl to have her own family 妖：weird would be a woman if she goes broken 姣: […]
#56: Poetry by Fred Dale
SOMETIMES GRASS IS A HAWK TO BE LEFT ALONE Forget what you know about hawks— the clawed mice, the breaking apart of their oyster shell bodies. I’m intrigued by their calm inclinations, when the other birds won’t give them a moment’s peace. Sometimes a hawk just wants to sit a spell, ruminate on dusk’s daily […]
#53: Poetry by Shreya Vikram
PRAYER TO THE TILES ON MY BEDROOM FLOOR Once, I hated you. Once, I wished for your softer cousins, toothless spreads. Once, I wanted things you denied me: the brush of cloth on my feet. Worship. Submission. Apology. You have waited me out. Made me feel things: bones, shifting like a sack of stones, my […]
#49: Poetry by Cecil Morris
A KIND OF APOLOGY When you rise and the streetlight leaking in catches you, your hair swinging down, your breasts shifting, I hear the tumbling piano notes of Weekend Edition and think of Liederman finding them after years of wandering through plenitude of possibilities, how he must have felt the rightness, the beauty, the way […]
#47: Poetry by Russell Thorburn
WILLIE HORTON DRESSED IN HIS BASEBALL UNIFORM, AFTER PLAYING THE YANKEES AT TIGER STADIUM His home run lifted up over the fence to beat the Yankees in the second game of a doubleheader that afternoon, but the rioters won’t listen to him standing on top of his luxury car; the boy who learned baseball was […]
#46: Poetry by Rodney Torreson
Dreams Should Not Dog Great Center Fielders who come in from the pasture. Dreams should be pets gone fat. In nightmares Mantle is cramped, broad-shouldered, in a taxi, hungry as Mutt, his father, who pitched his free time to get Mick a ticket from the mines. He’s late for the game, always. And DiMaggio […]
#43: Poetry by Allen Jones
DIGGING WITH MY FATHER When we roll her into the grave, one leg catches on the dark clay, running on alone. The first being to die in my arms, she sits three days before we bury her, death always early. We tie dishtowels around our faces, sling her bloated body into the wheelbarrow, […]