The oracles say the quiet part out loud. A wife is a machine of someone else’s dreams. To survive, you must drown a heart that wants to float, muscle atrophying in salt. Make an artifact out of your pain, a tribute to the girl you used to be. Ignore the hot pinch in your chest…
When she comes to take you away she asks if your ring comes off. You twist and twist. You surrender. Celeste says it will come off later. In those next hours so many doors open, none of them returning you to me. A man in the atrium below plays piano— an ambling, jazzy, wine spritzer….
A mast year for acorns, so like marbles and so many we’re afraid of falling. I walk sideways down the hill, holding a long stick; Kate goes before me wearing her orange knit cap. Everything alive is changing. Everything un-alive is changing. What did we think to stop? The broken trees lean on the unbroken…
So, I’ve grown less apparent apparently: the young men walk their dogs, and when our dogs meet we look at the dogs without raising our eyes to each other. The fathers stand outside the elementary school laughing with the mothers—Exactly, one of them says to the other— my passing presence faded like a well-washed once-blue…
In poetry, our winner is Logan Klutse, for his poems “Bronx Operating Room” and “Learning of Conspiracy Theories that ‘the Portal to Hell Resides Beneath the Denver Airport.’” Of the poems, poetry judge Sandra Cisneros says, “This poet’s work is unpretentious, intelligent, and intriguing. It mines the personal while confronting contemporary issues. Most refreshing is…
In poetry, our winner is Logan Klutse, for his poems “Bronx Operating Room” and “Learning of Conspiracy Theories that ‘the Portal to Hell Resides Beneath the Denver Airport.’” Of the poems, poetry judge Sandra Cisneros says, “This poet’s work is unpretentious, intelligent, and intriguing. It mines the personal while confronting contemporary issues. Most refreshing is…
Suddenly everyone’s friendly, 2020. We’re working in the front yard, Boyd and I, and our neighbor who’s never spoken to us calls out, “Good job!” And now we’re talking. She’s seventy-seven. “Early spring,” she says, and then, “My grandkids can’t come up to visit, because.” We nod. We’re nodders. We wave. We’re wavers. For years,…
I carry the East with me, I carry it to the West. Wrap it in layers in a small suitcase tagged for the West, In America there is a romance that calls for leaving Known people & places to head for the West. I open a suitcase & stare at shoes that leaked sand; Oh,…
He asks what I want him to do to me, the next move capable of unraveling our bodies precariously stacked. I tell him the truth: I don’t know. I do not tell him how I still can’t feel my body when in another man’s arms. I travel—backward, forward—the horizon is concealed by the still-brown trees…
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