By LindaAnn LoSchiavo She’s old, my neighbor, planting daffodilsAnd other bulbs, these plump brown hopes asleepFor now, when she addresses me, that voiceDeep, curved like a construction hook, as ifShe’s building with that voice things both of usWill need. A kaffir lily, bare root still,Is offered for inspection, years awayFrom blooming orange trumpets, syllablesBlown bright. […]

By Karl Kliparchuk The world is a meat grinder.We are born, made of stufffrom the past. Recycled people,pigs, chickens, beans, rice.The past becomes us. Our ancestorsonce walked, breathed the airwe enjoy, but we cannot heartheir voices, know their joys.Their voices have decayed like their bodies into dust.Dust that doesn’t know that it had a past

By Joseph Mills Having inched up the ladder’s rungs,holding the looped decorations like rope,you remember your brother’s comment,No one should get on a roof after fifty,and the fact you promised your partneryou wouldn’t clean out the gutterswhen no one was home. Technicallythis is different, and you are doing it for her since she loves Christmas

By Jonathan Everitt Dim-lit shoe store: Gallery of Wonders for defective limbs where mother ushers me for my first pair of corrective shoes at 6. Gone are my Buster Browns, dandy derbies traded for Frankensteinplatforms engineered to straighten kinks the doctor says have led to pigeon toes. By 12 my classmates mock my trot. How

By John Brantingham Today’s miracle is that last night’s rain melted the snow. All that water flowed downhill until the marsh flooded up to where I stand at the side of the road, little waves lapping my shoes, the sound of a heron echoing off tree trunks around me. Today’s miracle is the tiny rings

by Joan Mazza a woman overflowing urgencya squirrel squabbling with its communitylike ice creaking on a pond in deep winterlike logs crackling in a fireplace. My voice is the hum of bees returning to their hive,hungry after dancing to show where they’ve been.It’s the rattle and scream of a train on a curving track,the dream

By Janet Banks Upholstery rough on my seven-year-old kneesas I watch my world disappear in the rear windowof our pea-green Dodge. Goodbye, park swingswhere I learned to pump high, no need for a push.A trailer hitched to the back bumper weaves on twowheels, bobbing along from Primghar to Ida Grove.Mattresses, headboards, bedframes under quiltstied with

By Jan Wiezorek If you remember how “A” sounds in the word wanting, say it aloud like a daydream overcoming you, your slippery speech tongued by a fawn, with all its spots—lost in rangy gait, alone— wandering; if you remember the fawn of your own being—what a turn may bring or a sound that worries

By James Piatt It’s raining again, and dark clouds are huddling together in the cold air. Old memories awaken as I near the old farmhouse. I’m walking slower now, and the path seems to be growing dimmer. Old visions flicker, then ebb like the ocean’s tide in my aging mind. The muddy road to my

By Ian French but I have seen him kneelingin the green temple head bowedhands deep in sacramental soilheard him whisper blessings over tender seedling incantingthe spirits of sun and windand rain watched him pour holy wateron parched earth calling forth a tornado of Trumpet Flowers Black- Eyed Susans and Queen Anne’s Lacecigarettea glass of scotch

By Hiram Larew You pointed out So oftenThat no matter what else happensRoots will keep digging deeper.And many many times when things had gone to zeroYou’d say Just try to listenAnd you’d wink.In fact, once when going up some steps that were diceyYou turned around and nodded at me –Whatever was coming or about to

By Himanshi Sahni i have hated your teatoo strong for the mornings when we woke upwith so much ache in our hearts hopefully against ourselves and not each otherbut nowin your absence it is all i drink like poisonor a memory i do not know__Himanshi is a designer based in the Himalayan foothills of India.

By Giles Goodland Undrawn curtains: people laying tables, changing, as for a night’s work. You see a person in your room, wearing your expression. He has received the news you were always waiting for, and there is another there, on the bed, who you cannot see, but as the second splits past you resolve it

By Ed Brickell The lake is an open hand:Splinters of sun and styrofoam,Thrashing coots, cargo plane pelican landings.These women, bearing their scull like a cortege.The women chant numbers and commands,A mantra to remake the lake in their image.Beyond themselves, the words have no power.Still the water splits itself, seals the wound.The women’s watches stop with

By Dylan Stover Over the burrs asleep and winter’s bowed weeds, sunlight turns into things without bias:There’s a shadow, I say, plainly peelingfrom the bark of the sumac trees: the need inside’s been dead, white like bone for the last two summers (perhaps I alone have counted the time this way),as I continue to cuta

by Dorothy Johnson-Laird The ink river traces a line between the tall trees It finds space under the sky that turns a deeper blueThe moon dances slowly above the water She dips into the waves and then rises above the clouds The fishes swim on underneath the river They do not wait for the moon

By Dan Raphael Eating only goes so farat a timewithout the seasoning of appetiteno choice, the table’s setThe meals come in weekly cartonsbut I shuffle the deck—a day of three breakfastsa week without fishThis anonymous cow, wheat from three neighboring statessomething on this plate was bargedsomething was grown without soil or celestial lightWould this taste