All the familiar contours chasten. The lake is a pool of dark thought. There, the clouds bear pale change, gathered in contemplation. The lake is a cup of gray fear: your body in the cold dawn upturned, and my own drowning eye opened on the floating light. And I can see the pines unclasp each…
Our accord’s a ruin. One swipe across the cutting board scatters it. Away’s where I’m going and if that’s blood boiling, leave it on. The heart’s a saucepan, not a cauldron, the pint-size heart. It can’t harm you unless you’ve made illicit decisions. Have you made illicit decisions? Grit your wisdom teeth and don’t expect…
They’re free to run anywhere they like whenever they like, so they do. The land falls away from their small house on the hill along a prickly path; there’s a dirt road, a pasture where the steer are kept, swamps, a gully, groves of fruit trees, and then the creek from whose far bank a…
“I had known him as a child when he played guitar: thin, hyperactive; with a clear soprano then. Later, the golden curls had straightened and grown dark. He played nothing now but of a doubt so broad his family feared for him: Talent like that drives the nails in, they said, although it was the…
Curb your excesses, for I change and get absorbed too quickly. See? Already I’m taken in. Be like water, I told myself, strange aspiration for a vegetable, but by nature I was cold and humid. Now I quench thirst. This makes me useful, though primarily for the young in southern regions. Here in the north,…
for Geneviève Pastre Early summer in what I hope is “midlife,” and the sunlight makes me its own suggestions when I take my indolence to the river and breathe the breeze in. Years, here, seem to blend into one another. Houseboats, tugs, and barges don’t change complexion drastically (warts, wrinkles) until gestalt-shift dissolves the difference….
Ti Kikit puts on some pink lipstick, stands on the Place Saint-Pierrein Pétionville. For this evening she has borrowed a friend’s plastic barrettes, eleven of them, each pinching a spongy braid at its base, dotting her head with pink. She likes that corner of the ChoucouneHotel—white bougainvilleas overflow from behind the walls, make her feel…
First a startle of fragrances to remind me where I am: turf smoke blown through drizzle, oystery brine-tang over Quay Street. An umbrella-raking gale. Then mind-blowing blue above the town for a nanosecond until my airport-bound rented windscreen spatters with the weather’s wet splash of anticipation and by an astral lope I’m…
MASTHEAD Guest Editor Yusef Komunyakaa Editor Don Lee Poetry Editor David Daniel Assistant Editor Susan Conley Assistant Fiction Editor Maryanne O'Hara Founding Editor DeWitt Henry Founding Publisher Peter O'Malley Editorial Assistants: Jessica Olin, Dina Finz, and Tom Herd. Poetry Readers: Richard Morris, Caroline Kim, Renee Rooks, Michael Henry, R. J. Lavalee, Jessica Purdy, Brijit Brown,…
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