CL Bledsoe

Fill in the Blank

The _____ is already cool when you pull in
to the parking lot. A woman in a white
SUV drifts towards it, cutting across
spaces, eyes drawn like magnets. As soon
as you see the source, you jerk
into park, jump out and grab the thing, the soft
death, its dog smell reminiscent [...]

Eric Burke

Son, Litterateur

My mother built a concrete block wall to hold up half our yard. (We lived on a slope.) Father helped. When she was sixteen, my sister got pregnant. When the baby came, mother buried the umbilical cord in a cavity she had dug against the concrete wall (“near the [...]

Alan Stewart Carl

Cast Out

They built the house out of scrap lumber and blankets, using trees to help support the walls. Mom dug a cooking pit within a knot of roots; Dad made them beds out of leaves and moss. They asked their seventeen-year old daughter, Hester, to make the place pretty, so [...]

Joseph Celizic

CALLOW MONSTER

Rain had gurgled in the gutters outside your window the night before, the earth swelling around the duplex you share with your mother while you thought hideous thoughts.   Now you plod home through soggy mud porridge because your high school is only eight blocks away.   You near [...]

Katharine Coles

HOTEL MERCURE
listen to this poem

I could say you loom
And you would.   Could reach
My hand to touch you-

Lucid swimmer, slick
Whipper snapping through
My window’s dark.   Forgive me:

Could almost reach.   Moon,
Remember that hotel-
In-the-round, spinning

Us through the Paris night?   You
Used it as your mirror, every hall
Curving out of sight, into

Geometry’s [...]

Ori Fienberg

Glass Boat

for the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA

The artists of the city decided to build a glass boat.   It had a glass keel, and a glass mast with glass sails.   But what could they do with a glass boat?  Out on the ocean it made [...]

Elisa Gabbert and Kathleen Rooney

AUBADE THAT MISSES THE POINT

Passivity mixed with infatuation
doesn’t temper the infatuation-

can we rewind for a minute,
to before my confession

about strapless white gowns?
Whatever was happening,

one of the prettiest songs
from adolescent memory

distracted me from the sheet,
its stains, you sprawled out

& not listening anyway, thinking
of me as a distraction.

AUBADE WITH BLACKBERRY

Quietly allowing the [...]

Emilie Lindemann

Reading Practices (of Shoes)

The sales associate must lift the lid.

She may have manicured fingernails. She may be expecting
a child. Inside
the box,

she should whisper to each of the shoes.
Then,

take a deep                               breath.

Listen: US 8 UK 7 [...]

Kimberly Lojewski

An Arctic Mirage Sounds a Lot Like Rusty Crickets

During the pitch black of winter, we Muktuk princesses train around the clock for our competition. We shoot rifles into the long days of polar darkness, aiming at the glowing rods of fluorescent bulbs pilfered from the warehouse in Iqaluit. Piaraq, our [...]

Corey Mesler

The Earth Knows my Secret Love

I sleep beneath the rainbow
and wake from dreams
of your humid core.
The sky knows my infidelity.
The earth, brown and
worm-etched, knows my secret
love. It is the Sabbath
here in my perimeter. This
means I pray. I pray for
more dreams, for fidelity, and
for a return to your core,
full of pure, [...]

Michelle Reale

Swayed

The Proposition

He says he wants to paint my face.   I still cannot pronounce his name.  He laughs,in a kind way, when I try.    He looks at me as if I might be a fragile  thing.

Advice and a Question

My sister gives it freely like a zealot [...]

Christopher Ryan

WORK HISTORY

I cleaned a rape counseling center on Sunday mornings. I began with the toilets. They were American Standards. The building was at the edge of the new highway and the possibility of a car landing on the roof was valid. This was the deep South, so just about everyone [...]

Erik Smetana

Headlines

I should have called ahead, said I’d be home early, maybe then I wouldn’t have found you. Twin-Engine Vanishes Over Upstate New York. Feed the Bear (Market): Rumblings of Fed Move. Who Wore Who — Red Carpet Breakdown? America’s Healthiest Cities, the Good and Ugly. Broken, lost, alone, that’s how [...]

Amber Sparks

Storage Space
listen to this story

The homeless woman was huge, loud, foul-mouthed. She cursed at the doctor as he pushed and prodded at her, called him a goddamn-no-good-son-of-a-bitch for invading all her spaces.

The doctor was toned and tan and to him, the woman was a house. He flung open doors, pulled [...]

Charles Dodd White

Hawkins’s Boy

True, Hawkins buried his son more than once that summer. Wild dogs would get at the limbs glowing pale as quartz in the shallow ground, gnawing through the shroud of croaker sacks. They clacked their jaws, ceding nothing to sin or dignity. When he’d first buried the boy, Hawkins [...]

Maya Jewell Zeller

Before the River Freezes

If you listen
in the mornings, you’ll hear
this valley’s strips of shade
stretch and yawn
across your lidded eyes,
the grass lock tight
to your grayness.
How easy it is then
to show you this river,
the gravel bar,
the bend where I as a girl
might have lain
across a beached alder
all afternoon
eating blackberries,
licking the red
from my [...]