Rain slipped unharmed across the last finger of the Florida fire. She waited a moment, face flushed with heat, sweat streaking across her charcoal face, eye whites bright with adrenaline as she made sure that Wylie and I had escaped the tinderbox pine forest. Wylie’s thick braid hung heavy halfway down his back. He faced…
There it was, happening in spite of cold slant rain, crosscut of wind against our faces, and the spent light of the shortest day of the year—a muddy cow on her huge side, all four feet stretched straight out in the air, heaving to push what looked like a swollen…
Theseus had one the first time he went hunting the minotaur, an embarrassing little tale the bards usually ignore, but it’s true as the golden beard on Hercules’s face. Theseus took his sword and ball of string, then wound his way through much of the labyrinth, his marching boots thudding hollowly on the earth, then…
I went to the river, but the river was dry. I fell to my knees, and looked to the sky. —Emmylou Harris Colleen, this is the time of grasshoppers and all that I see is dying except for my virulent love for you. The Cowturdville Star-Times, which usually has a typo in every column, says…
You will use it for the flowers the others bring because he is dead. Or you will use it for dark blue light, the arc of it when, the next evening, the sun cries over the house and sends all the windows to the floor. A trill of orchids wilts over the rim. You will…
for Dale Devereux Barker The artist and author wish to express their gratitude to the publications in which these collaborations originally appeared: “Particeps Criminis”: TransAtlantic News; “Disgruntled Lug”: Science and Wonder; “Forbidden Rhymes”: Psychology Today; “A Sable Figure Cloaked in Gloom Told Us This Hilarious Joke”: Psychological Digest; “Killer Abstractions”: Modern Psychology; “You Don’t…
Death does not speak to me with meaty breath although ancient hamburgers dance through my veins and the leering buffalo skull on the wall above my couch dribbles drool onto my heart. At fifty, I have learned to see the Grim Reaper in all his disguises. I can see him in a can of Budweiser….
Your head is the heaviest cabbage in the world, full of spiced apples and lamb. Where you are is where you must be—a gravel parking lot by a squat cinder-block building, slumped, a dropped marionette. You breathe, a ray aside a bucket of chum— after giving up the hook. The bow toward the big city….
A year later, a Tuesday or Wednesday, I remember the students out back playing tennis in air so cold it puckered the rain barrel & my radio said what it couldn’t say while Big Joe did bench presses in the basement & the radio went idiotically silent. Remember Al Hibler singing…
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