Category: Poetry

Issue 27 | Winter 2021

Come On Up to the House

By | Poetry

Were they tall terns? Or meant to be herons? Lined along the sill of your big bay window, the small wooden birds your hard hands carved as Christmas gifts for a dozen children,

Issue 27 | Winter 2021

As If There Were Lessons

By | Poetry

Those were the hours, infected, we were aware of her body, the fever wringing out the cloth of her, the sheets a witness. This was a skirmish in a war of attrition

Issue 27 | Winter 2021

Memory Theater

By | Poetry

Can’t find my shoes. Forget them. Torn sheet? Forget that. The soft quilt drifts, my cast-off reading glasses tilt sideways— slippery sheet, blind glasses, orphan shoes: a stage for drunken love though I’m sober.

Issue 27 | Winter 2021

Mother

By | Poetry

The truth is I will never again see the mother I know, the one always halfway through four different books, or making the light on the water perfect in her pastel landscapes.

Issue 27 | Winter 2021

A New Kind of Paper

By | Poetry

Soft light lands and pops on your clavicles like soap bubbles. The restoration crew comes and goes like field medics

Issue 27 | Winter 2021

Soma

By | Poetry

Her heart two-steps, now flesh, now metaphor, while her mind—the brain when it blushes— gently nets a halo: thought bubbles and unlit bulbs.

Issue 26 | Fall 2020

Joanie, Lam: Blythewood, SC, 1990

By | Poetry

I liked the idea that I could make it go away  with words, but ultimately, they would find  nothing because I never wrote.

Issue 26 | Fall 2020

Black Birder

By | Poetry

Instead, he finds the cardinal, drop of blood flitting through the leaves, dancing where the light moves a hand as it breaks here, breaks there, casts shadow against ashen bark.