How long would it take to growan Eastern White Oakeighty feet tall in your own backyard? And how longmight it take to burn oneall the way down? Could you shoot that on your phoneand let your battery run downuntil the ash at your feet is cool to touch? Even now, I canfeel grubs tunneling undertheir…
Does the rabbit know the fox has also turned to snow?You don’t raise pigs for milk.Wind pursues what it has blown away. Rain fallsgently on the city and its sirens. We’re more water than dust.Every umbrella is a big top.And childhood is a name for a visionary state.If I didn’t try to teach, I’d have…
It’s what the phlebotomists always say, gushing when I slide up my sleeve, straighten my arm to boast bulging channels evergreen like spruce, leafy green like a spring mix, they bubble with delight palpating each protuberance, each tubular translucence swimming just beneath my skin, I suppose they are, perfectly plump for puncture, these outcurved creeks, transporters of blood—I’ve been thinking about blood, I’ve been thinking…
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…
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…
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…
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?…
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…
If we were to try to keep this even, or at least find the midpoint in this argument before anyone gets meanwe’d be golden.Let’s say when you said maybe we’re not meant to be with just one person I had responded with – what do you mean by being with someone – what do you mean by meant but instead, I swallowed the plumb…
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