Genre: Poetry

Walls

Issue 9 | Winter 2022 |

    for warmth, to lineate a private space, to brace a roof, frame a window, adorn with photos, a diploma. Question them otherwise: why the need for this side and another? for height to daunt a climb? Consider the utility— and the inevitable ruins they all become.

To the Death

Issue 8 | Summer 2022 |

  My husband and I had a fight today about pictures—I never like the ones of me, and that pisses him off. My negativity pisses him off. In any picture taken right now, or a few days ago, or last year, I always think I look old, or tired. But tonight, I am poring over …

Scion

Issue 8 | Summer 2022 |

    Take yellow—new flame              flickering cool              out of scrap. Or lemon: fruit implying              flower, implying branch—              fuel for a hotter fire to smoke the cloudless night              with citrus. Sour candies              in cellophane, stashed in the back of Grandma Tucker’s              silver drawer, first place              to look after the long drive— the old Volvo’s water pump …

Riverlands Aubade

Issue 8 | Summer 2022 |

    The river is always there even when he doesn’t see it for weeks because he’s busy milking cows and scooping pig shit and piling fieldstone into a wall along the low end of their property, — something to slow erosion,              something to make it all last                           a bit longer — and his dog …

Sea Glass and Agate

Issue 8 | Summer 2022 |

    sit in a bowl next to the photo that looks black and white, its vastness lost in atmospheric haze, him wrapped in grey light. A distant lighthouse pulsating through the fog, a premonition from some unknowable shore, before the nights laced with heroin became interlocked with days, turning years into decades, dragging him …

Prince Prospero at Boca Grande

Issue 8 | Summer 2022 |

    Brown salty water foams and surges through the narrow slit forty feet deep past the sandy nose of Little Gasparilla, the empty weathered frame of the unfinished house on its beach. No one is here to see the grim parade coming in with the tide. Red grouper with bulging eyes, line-sided snook, brown …

Perplexities

Issue 8 | Summer 2022 |

    1.   How a bullet can come through a window,       land in the dog’s water dish       just beside the man standing in the kitchen.       On the news they said it seemed to come from nowhere;       amazingly, it touched no one on the way.   2.   In only one generation,       the wings of the swallows …