Susan Schulz
—a golden shovel after Diane Seuss’ frank: sonnets pg 37
Let me first say I never knew if
you left me or I left you.
My therapist wants me to consider what it is that I want
and I tell her I think it’s a toasted pumpernickel bagel with butter but I can’t because of the
Susan Schulz
So many things are happening. So many things keep happening you wouldn’t believe it. Or maybe you would. The snow was bad in the Southtowns last night. Do you know about those kinds of things? I’ve just finished Ammons’ Garbage and I’ve folded down the corner on the page where he says life is not first for being remembered but for being lived! But here I am lost in the remembering again, pressing two fingers deep […]
David P. Miller
I carried rubber gloves as prophylactics
against alien doorknobs. We scrubbed
our groceries, panicked that our plague
might be as much attached to fomites
as to aerosols. I couldn’t quite believe
that still-warm laundry would corrupt
after resting on an unsterilized tabletop.
I also didn’t disbelieve it.
May I allow myself a modest smile for
the physical dread we handed, one to one?
In place of homo sapiens’ religion of
raw dominance over […]
Michael Berton
when the tequila runs out
poets in Mexico will write
elegies to honor
los borrachos
who will become atheists
refusing to acknowledge
patron saints’ days
for only the cowardly
can consent to live
a dishonored life
About the Author
Michael Berton is an educator, world traveler, percussionist and tequila aficionado. He has had poems appear in Cold Noon, Sin […]
Fred Pollack
A small clean flat in a mixed low-crime
arrondissement. White wife from
a once-Communist family.
No kids. Familiar on the metro (which
he has always disliked but accepts); in
their local place, a two-star restaurant.
Adds numbers for a firm in La Défense.
Works well, but won’t be made department head.
Some of those numbers, elsewhere, create scenes
like those he remembers – everything possible
done to his village, […]
Annette M. Sisson
This small earth, the tide’s salt-edged tongues, damp licking. Breath eddies, swells the sponge of lungs, lobes suspended amid sky and sea, exhaling, exhaling. Gust gathers, sweeps through the priory ruins, presses sheaves of basalt, wrenches cord grass and bogbean—the chest-hinge opens. Blood thumps. Gale surges, crests, pummels laps of sand. Ancient monks murmur, figments in spray. Slick, mercurial bodies, molded heads—grey seals bob in surf; they lumber to shore, clamber onto rock, keep vigil, quiet as gospel on calfskin.
About […]
Annette M. Sisson
Outside the Frame
after Remedios Varo’s painting “Rupture”
A woman resists the canvas, her journey—
silent birth, the slit between gravid
doors. She descends wide stairs
as if steps were shallow coffins
of ancestors’ bones. If she reaches
the flat path, she might breathe
new air—or be locked away.
She inches down, again, again,
measured, her feet subtle, sun
At thirteen
Peeling potatoes in my mother’s kitchen
I never thought I’d ever get to be twenty.
Didn’t think of growing old, only of stillness
some sort of frozen time in the peeling of ages
while the trees would endlessly
blossom on a full moon, the summers
would always bring seed-filled fruits
[…]
