Months after it has all come out, Annie will go on thinking about Baby R and Mondo and how it could just as easily have been her. And yet, somehow Annie had always been able to slip away, hardly aware that she was doing so. Today, she was walking into the locker room,…
So big deal, so you find it sort of sucks, the voice said. Fine. Go out to your regular life where they pay you for doing something. The poem’s okay in that pile of old papers. You’ll see how you’ll empty the day, be back and open the door. Keys, even useless ones, have a…
Winter 2008-09 Stephen Ackerman"s poems have appeared in The Antioch Review, Boulevard, Columbia Review, Mudfish, Partisan Review, Seneca Review and upstreet. He lives with his wife, Laurie, and their sons, Nick and Will, in Dutchess County, New York. "I Would Live a Day with You" is from his manuscript Late Life. Dick Allen"s new collection…
A giant poplar shades the summer square. Breakfast shift done, Reem smooths her kinky mass of auburn curls, walks outside, her leaf-print dress green shadow on post-millennial bright air. It’s almost noon. I smell of sweat. I smell despite bain-moussant and deodorant, crumpled and aging , while recognizant of luck , to be, today, perennial…
How do you know? —Hardy, The Year’s Awakening Finch at my feeder, how do you know in muddy March to turn the first gold feather? By the light’s small increase, by the lesser night, the cell’s disturbance cold winter sleep awake? You do not know, nor I, why jonquils burn nor blood in Palestine—unwitting feather,…
Parked on the rock of the kitchen floor that the landlady put in herself, stone by stone, uneven, smooth, buttery, I talked—I guess loudly (it was a party, and there was wine) with a woman the color of wheat, even her eyelashes, and she was worried, she was saying, about the execution coming that morning…
I. In the absence of reliable ghosts I made aria, Coughing into emptiness, and it came A west wind from the plains with its arbitrary arsenal: Torn sails from the Ganga river, Bits of spurned silk, Strips of jute to be fashioned into lines, What words stake—sentence and make believe, A lyric summoning. II….
We’ve prepared him so well for re-entry: His arms are stronger from pulling himself up on that triangle of stainless steel dangling above his bed at Walter Reed. His deltoids look defined, he works them when his wheel spokes flash dodging the physical therapist, the mouseshit, the black mold behind the door— …
There is, indeed, no reason why Failure should not have its Plutarch… —Samuel Smiles What made you pull it from the shelf? The lettering on its spine rubbed off hundreds of hands ago. It could be anybody’s book now, as a skull could form the armature for Hitler’s cheek or Jesus’. Open it. No…
No products in the cart.