Question
What birdwas thatthat justflew throughmy mind?
Poetry
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Idioms Make an Idiot of Me
Open carry, open for business,open and shut case. Openlike a store. Open like a vault.Any opening in my defenses is yourfault so I close it all up as tight asI can. Then I fold closed bothmy hands again. This gesturemakes a fist. It makes me listlessand makes me brisk and makesme wish for the bicycle…
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Selections from 100 Best Ideas
Transcendence The first thing is silence: the muffling power of snow, that Fairbankssnow hanging on every limb and twig. No noise from nearby roads, nosounds of planes taking off at the airport. Just my skis gliding along,my poles crunching the snow. My breath, and if I stopped to listen, thesound of my heart beating. is…
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That Pasta
Translated from the Spanish by Pablo Medina That pasta in cream sauce we made when we finished,that pasta we ate still trembling(we left the water on the stove,on a very low flame,and fifteen minutes before the endyou flew, barefoot, and threw it inand barefoot flew back, remember?) That pasta back when dusk fellwith its smell of…
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Postmarked from the Middle of Nowhere
When someone says It’s the middle of nowhere,they don’t mean New York or Boston or LA,they mean where you and I are from—Tennessee and West Virginia,Kentucky and Mississippi and Alabama.Those rural places where our lives are unfolding.Where my grandmother Maria Garcia Peña is laughing her big golden ringsof laughter in the kitchen above a frying…
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Superbloom, A Day After My Daughter’s Diagnosis
They call this extravagance a “spectrum.”The pack of lupine howling out a deep-throated blues.The fiddleneck’s golden arpeggio.The hoot of fuchsia emanating from a parliamentof owl’s clover. Surely the wild hyacinthdidn’t mean to bring me to my knees,but here I am brushing bugs from tiny petalsas she wanders from one color to the next,declaring each to…
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April is the cruelest month, except all the ones before it
I never met a February I liked, shorter or short, though the birds are no longer wary, and chivesrush out green in an herb garden cemetery. Onething the sickle branch says is that mulberriesare months away, despite how hungry sidewalkshave gotten for smushed sweets after another seasonof salt and the crushed blue light of sun…
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The Death of Eve
On the first day God began splittingthings, and time began.The angels gathered in little groups—even though it was forbidden—and said things like: remember when deathand life were the same?Remember the language of trees?Remember love before hate became its own thing? God said remembering was just for Sundaysbut people were already beginning to ignore him.Remember God?…
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Longing (Emerging Writer’s Contest Winner: POETRY)
In poetry, our winner is Andy Chen, for his piece “Longing.” This year’s poetry judge was Porsha Olayiwola. Of the poem, she writes: “‘Longing’ manages to instill within its reader the same essence that the poem itself is after. That is, we read this poem overwhelmed in a sense of longing. The ellipses, ending or…