As I stand in the shower and watch morning slither in through the milky window, I think about death. I think about it over and over again, my mind turning…
Under the white dresser near the closet in our master bathroom, surrounded by an impressive collection of dust bunnies, sits a pair of women’s shoes. The shoes are brown low-top…
Back in October 1985, I woke up to the horses screaming. My parents weren’t home – they were spending the last of their paychecks line dancing and whiskey-tasting. They could…
Tell me where I’ll be hanged. The elm? The gallows? The balcony of my lover’s home? Don’t let my students watch, don’t let the girls see. I haven’t yet taught…
Mother touches their face and blinks like Morse code. No one understands her. I translate and do the readings for our tribe. Sometimes she picks up her stick and hits…
A part of your body ached, the doctor pressed it. Said—fine here, take these, Sylvia. But you replaced the pills with music. Fine. You knew enough to be a woman,…
Listen: it’s raining ash. The one holding his nose tight in blueish kleenex is your dead neighbor’s only certified son, heir to eleven thumbs and a language made of…
We heard about it on the radio Sunday morning: Older people in New Zealand were forgoing book groups in favor of coffin clubs. They were learning carpentry and reminding themselves…
Rose petals lie open to the wind. Vibrant fuchsia has faded to a soft blush, the color now muted of its former vitality. A few petals have fallen and now…
She is serenity. A portrait fixed with a face like the Middle Pacific; cold and beckoning. As the frosted dirt cracks beneath my small feet, beneath layers of dead corn…
A Note from the Editor: Many of the photographs you will see in this issue are from Asher — no last name, simply as is. Asher is a sculptor from…
This dewdrop world— Is a dewdrop world, And yet, and yet… —Kobayashi Issa * Every night before sleep, I turn on a fan. Sometimes multiple ones. Ceiling and bedside. Pedestal…
Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt. -Kurt Vonnegut Our separate selves whiplashed into twin stupors when we finally found your lost dog—her wet tongue sunk in the crater of this…
There are few things your dad can do that will surprise you, but sending your cat back to the shelter and claiming to bury a bunch of money in the…
A determined fog on the windshield tested the Volvo’s defrost, and its lack of motivation, as did the rain on the wipers, and the hectic speed, which took much of…
She knows that there is something wrong with her when there have been no flowers in her house for weeks. The air smells of uninhabited hearts and crushed moths and…
This man, Tom Goodnough, looked guilty as he slunk along, but that was how he always looked even when he’d done nothing wrong. His facial features didn’t help: flatline of…
Dara’s house was old and porous. In September, in the waning warm days, the spiders claimed it for their own. They loved the north side of the house, where the…
Children hear of water-hoardings. Lorelei floating gold cups, coaxing gullible girls down. Ancient cities settled by kelp and shells. Rivers refusing tossed-in shoes, certain that boys thought dead are somewhere…
The infrastructure is sound, the demarcation lines on the roads clear and new, and the curbs and their boulevards handsomely curt and reliable. But it’s a bore. And it’s a…
A boy slumps sideways in a wheelchair, a breathing tube attached to his mouth like an umbilical cord. Riley could have been him if he had lived. The boy wears…
From the nightmare we wake to the dream before we open our eyes to reality I fear I fret I freeze I forge I face I forget I love you,…
I dream about an accident: Jackie and Kyle and I in the car, the car upside down and Jackie hanging limp beside me. My ears are ringing. Sirens and screams…
I taped flyers to the maple trees that lined both sides of the street. Your gap-toothed smile stared back at me, crooked school tie, and favourite pink bow. I only had one…
We will still walk hand in hand, talking each other down from our brittle edges and I will wonder if my mother’s blood has finally gone bad beneath the skin.…
October 13th, 1966 Carl Wisconsin c/o Nipost 711 Nulla St. Mankato Mississippi Dear Carl, I found your address in the name-change section of a foreign newspaper. But asides the section…
Curb corners accumulate dandelions, cigarettes, & skeletons, compliments of the whirlwind as it keens through errant sunbeams. Antennae twitch at smashed gears. I nudge a broken spider with my toe,…
I was three years old, the youngest of three, when my father passed away in Rawalpindi, Pakistan. I have no recollection of him. Any remainders are memories of memories, or…
Across a tiny white square of table, your friend Joanie is slowly dying, although neither of you is supposed to know that just yet. She is wearing an exultant silk…
Your mother starts crying when Dami turns up for his funeral. He is fashionably late. You expect this. You also expect him to overdo his entrance, but you are still…
I’m lying in the ditch, bleeding. My son has died. I can’t move, can’t climb. I will never be the same. I will never be the same. I hear you…
The pink of your thighs folding in is the conch I hold to my mouth and the soft curve of your body a bell to my ear. Sickness washes in…
all broken and yellow as antique things tend to be there is beauty in oxidation, in the elements eating through metal like larvae     through leaf the smell…
He refuses to eat vegetables from our garden, says nothing grown half a mile from a steel mill can be safe. What about me, then? But I, I refuse to…
“Your lips are a door, your mind is the key.” Those words your mother whispered to you scream louder in your head than her ensuing screeches as they placed the…
After Remedios Varo If I do not tell you of the lichen growing on the living room floor will you feel it on the soles of your feet? What of…
I sat across from him, shooting his portrait with my phone. His charcoal sweatshirt faded into the dark booth. He played tic-tac-toe in the dim light. I should have known…
undeath is in creation / and the degloving of hands / digging up of pale yellow talisman / kiss of moonlight through the willow branches / fade / d /…
Long are the rhythms of pain in the fall– Single leaves upon the wind float then flip, I assume them dead kin: a tree frog a thrush a red squirrel…
Harvard College Reunion, Class of 1958 Adrift between symposia and seminars, a drizzle of reverie on Bow Street, aimless nostalgia graying in droplets of fog. At the corner of Arrow…
