Inuit stone cut and stencil —Kananginak Pootoogook The two caribou ground me frozen in their stone-cut repose brown and white on sea-grey background, one floating above the other, perspective be damned. Legs, folded neatly underneath elegant bodies of speckled brown; one looks behind, another to the east, and I imagine the sun rising before their …
Let me introduce you to the season of want. Rain falls with insidious intent to tell to tell to tell. Shale cliffs shed their secrets once covered in ice, chip by jagged chip. How to reverse this erasure? How to find words buried deep in our throats—words that glowed red as coals—those long winter nights. …
“Poetry is the blood-jet. There is no stopping it” —Sylvia Plath A drop of red on the wooden cutting board alongside the slab of bloody beef—but my own chicken heart has birthed it, too fool to secure the sharp blade fully in my palm and now the dilemma of cleaning with a dripping thumb on …
Beneath the swooping power lines only char and the smell of char abides where we burned the spiny winged leaves of Scotch thistle and the barbed white crowns of teazel— in the fen, no dusk scent of clove and of honey drifts from damask violets wilted with vinegar to pale stalks—on the east slopes at …
The life I die moves through the death I live The life I die moves through the death I live, mired in a lunar melt of Americana— a bootstrap wasteland of half-knitted gifts, bible radio static and Madonna. The Buddha says it is better to travel well than to arrive, but he never drove to …
Our father, who aren’t in Baltimore anymore or anywhere so far as I can tell no sight of you no sound not in the grass and scarred red clay, not in the woods where trees fall to another’s hand or stand self-shadowed, not in garden given back to morning glory cocklebur wild wind-dropped seeds I. …
by Matthew Thorburn (winner of the 2014 Coal Hill Review Chapbook Prize) First Light The sun breaks like an egg over everything east of here. Stop stop, enough enough, the sparrows say—or that’s what Lao Wen says they say in Chinese. Take your tarnished horn, your wooden flute and break this silence—alone beside the dark …
What would you do to live tonight? Surrounded by enemy kids, would you shoot anything that’s yellow? And when the enemy kids try to overrun you, would you have the guts to rain-down napalm like the monsoon? And when you go home and go to work, your medals yellowing in the drawer, would you tell …