Water spirals clockwise or not depending on hemisphereThis too is rumor. Like home, like country.Mythology is rife with images of exile — serpent of firegorging wax, palace aflame like a…
The stretch and launch of untargeted pennies planted our land in bronze. Pinching leather over Lincoln, we pulled…
never seen her tuck a shirt in a skirt/ a pencil, a book & a bagtied to her back for school never seen her count stones/ add bottle lids togetherfor…
Header photograph by Charlotte Hamrick.
Underwater rumblings off the coast of Oregon, apt occurrences while I ponder seismic waves crashing through my brain. How much pain can you possibly cause all these years later? The…
I don’t know who my great-great-grand- mother was, but I know she would tell me to stop crying, don’t run away, respect what the devil says, reciting Bible parables of…
I worry the hammer writing its bite in a script of bruises doesn’t distinguish between fiction and prayer. I don’t ask for much. Sunlight more like bed than whip of…
Swamp bones and chicken feet bloated flesh in muddy creek Hush now, she’s a comin’ creepin’ up from behind Header photograph © Chris Nielsen.
The birds sound more human than us tonight. The street: a black snake squeezing empty shops, a dark whiskey no one drinks. The trees look burned with bird wings, murmuring…
nothing apparently is imminent, but the extra weight; the hair increasingly, if not the texture, then the hue of the bristles in the wire brush you used to scrape the…
I thank her too early, the woman who has brought me tea in a broken handle cup that was once my mother’s. It’s plain orange pekoe, the kind that ails…
from my bedroom window I see those kids sitting on the edge of that rusty water tower looking off into that distance just swamps and marshes over there that’d be…
In which joy and wonder are born out of darkness The bruises are gone but the ridges of your fingerprints can never be rubbed off by other, more gentle hands,…
Winter’s heart is tired, the center of the season something that beats only when the wind knocks against it the way a window cracks when birds mistake its shine for…
open windows invite birdsong and I am weightless upon the wind your promises are like whispers of bulletproof glass, safe rebellion there is divinity in midnight joyrides and we are…
Finger joints curling back into themselves tucking away vulnerability knuckles bloodthirsty canines jagged mountaintops volcanic uppercuts we reach alpha heights Thunder- crack sharp thump sledgehammer- blunt…
Today I am a pot plant yesterday a tapestry of vine leaves tomorrow I’ll turn emerald green against the lawn laughing when they laugh desperately trying to…
I was not appointed anything so linear as a form like yours, nothing so costly as your eyes—mine are little departures, stained where yours had been basins, washed over white.…
Header photograph © Heather Wharram.
Trigger warning: depictions of sexual abuse You bury your past between thighs open up secrets from graves disinterred lives saying kill the beast which does not look like you…
Always the twilight: a burning car crash. Always the car crash towed away by the moon. Always the stars gather and grind their way to some rhythm we think we…
