My brothers will not name their sons Hiram though I see them— bird-chested boys with floppy ears and big noses climbing trees and throwing rocks through windows of abandoned garages, whose shouting springs kernels from their cobs. But when my brothers and I meet for dinner and speak of our future children, it’s like children …
Flight Plan Let’s speak to each other in the language of paper airplanes, bend our edges in to meet and fold the quiet into shapes, mold our wings according to the soft geometry of handmade things. Let’s use our time aloft to catch our breath and clear the air before we yaw, pamper back the …
For Will The Green Flash And on certain nights on palm-treed Cayman beaches, the renters wander out at sunset among the scattered chairs, the half-buried sandwich crusts, all the clatter of the day gone, the babies glazed with sleep, and all …
by Paul Martin (co-winner of the 2012 Coal Hill Review Chapbook Prize) For my family, the seen and the unseen The Regulator Its long, brown wooden case hung on the kitchen wall in the first house, the heavy, brass pendulum moving deliberately above my grandmother standing over the coal stove stuffing pork with garlic …
by Matt Terhune (co-winner of the 2011 Coal Hill Review Chapbook Prize) 1987 There was always one girl who got too drunk in Lisa’s backyard that summer, face down on the cement lawn that circled the pool like the gravelly mineral clasp around a bead of turquoise on a necklace, mumbling a whiskeyed rasp …
My grandfather never told me about his life before he came to America; instead, we watched boxing matches, cartoons, and cowboys & Indians on a b & w TV; he taught me how to play cards and crack walnuts, how to hammer a nail and saw wood; summers, he showed me how to pick grape …
for JB At the rhododendron garden she shows me her wrist with its pale white scar. The blooms bleed behind us in red, white and pink. It’s not muggy yet, but soon the air will grow heavy like the dark can do, moving over you so much so that the blade or the gun (which …
All the pretty girls wear dresses in the summer— round, white shoulders. A small, blue scarf tied just so. But even in your infinite beauty, how could you leave me? And no, I don’t mean how could you take that job in New York I mean how could you leave me? I remember my own …