I missed this year the burning of the grasses, my friend masked by a red bandana, torch in hand, surrounded by a choir of men chanting shovel and rake, a…
Sophie She remembers hearing “head for the hills”, maybe an old Western maybe her father’s idea of escape from a bad marriage. When the last of winter’s snow turned as drab gray as…
Header photograph © Jono Verrall.
After your call. After an all-night drive down I-95. Its spine of red lights, white lights slashing the darkness, I blinked. Like lava, the lights erupted on my eyelids. They…
Header photograph © Cory Funk.
for you to spill yourself into, stacked neatly on the sideboard in the shape of kidneys, softened sickles, the color of rosewater, the color of blood in water. In hospitals…
— Let me win your heart and mind or I’ll burn your God damn hut down (inscription on a Vietnam War Zippo lighter casing) Then Uncle Sam shipped the…
there are certain quiets that can only happen in the yawn of august: the unspoken eulogy of paper-machete earthworms on a walkway; the reconciliation of a misplaced kiss and a…
Header photograph © Cory Funk.
I With robust assurances his heart gives him leave, and he chooses where to put up fence posts. A random job at best, like cliff jogging in fog, he dons a belt of…
Alligator Alley in the dead of October night is the flat-out loneliest-ever ribbon of highway running between the lost-gold coasts of my naked heart. Beneath Orion’s gleam, Everglades’ swamps and…
My grandmother envied my hands, the length of my slim fingers. She imagined she could play the piano more gracefully with hands like mine. I tried, gave up, like kids…
We wandered the beach before dawn, the tide thieving the white beneath our feet. At the edge of the resort property a man with a rifle emerged from the jungle,…
Header photograph © Jerry Mathes II.
That last summer my parents were married we had an above-ground pool— big blue circle of a perfect July, envy of all the neighbor kids who rode their bikes over,…
I think my neighbor can hear me, when I knock my head on the wall. I can hear her hear me; she fries two eggs—maybe she lives in the flakes…
Header photograph © Jerry Mathes II.
Ponytailed hospice guy says there’s no need to beware the death rattle, my father is in no pain, those last rasping breaths mere babble of useless fluid. What he didn’t…
Header photograph © Icy Blu Daniel.
Most doors are half open The young approach and fling open So much depends on seasons Yellow petals spring open La lumière is not flicked on Light is a hand…
I got on the streetcar at dundas and just went – I was new, didn’t know where I was going or why but it turned out to be the junction…
