A Travelogue from the Imagination David Shumate. High Water Mark . University of Pittsburg Press, 2004. Paper, 69 pp., $12.95. Prose poetry, I was recently informed at a party, is …
Eyewitness Storm Spotter Christian Hawkey. The Book of Funnels . Verse Press, 2004. Paper, 77 pp., $13. In Christian Hawkey’s first collection of poetry, The Book of Funnels , …
The Rhyme Between “Voice” and “Fate”: Contemporary Polish Poetry Carnivorous Boy, Carnivorous Bird: Poetry from Poland . Selected by Marcin Baran. Edited by Anna Skucinska and Elzbieta …
Expatriate in Love Marilyn Abildskov. The Men In My Country . University of Iowa Press, 2004. Hardcover, 166 pp., $29.95. I remember first leaving the customs area of Kimpo Airport in …
If ever there were words for birds These come as some surprise, distressed, Dying. Days on end, routine as a tide. As awful as a fish who’s drowned. Disturbed as though atomized. In order to …
It felt like a story sorry it’d lost all its sentences, Like a sentence looking for its syntax. All of the words had homeless, unemployed, orphan Written all over their faces. It had that …
A crop duster on the deck pumps DDT into the lake cabin— ah, the year was right for summering, but not for breathing. Oh, years enough ahead for all the kids’ breath and the years they won’t …
Litany Mathias Svalina Shade: new buildings require fresh blood, or, with reservations, a boy’s shadow trapped in the foundation. Shade: by candlelight the solid …
In all her childhood photos that survive, my mother wears a costume of some kind: A scowling gypsy with her tambourine; chauffeur in worn livery poised to drive a cardboard roadster; bold pirate, …
With enough unpleasantness in the air your mind exhales, you can ruin anything. You can ruin the fifties by thinking freon, McCarthy . Spoil an hour rereading ingredients in the cereal in …
I told you the story in the kitchen, shouting over the shouting river. You examined your hands, the thin lines in your wrists like the snaking of blue on a map, then gave your apple a name …
When we were young girls and swam naked in Turkey Lake we were like animals: our legs were thickly furred. We took the trees’ rustling for a sign of their watching. Even the limestone drooled from …
While they speak in cafés of love and freedom and that kind of thing, how could you say love was abandoned, how it eluded even solitude, or how justice is shaped by the chaos of a thousand insults …
I met you cast away in a giant city where people pass by and disappear inside its oceanic yowl. It was miraculous how new words burst from my desert mouth. I put them in a bottle without promises, …
It’s like Jesse was never here at all, he’s been so long gone, like a gunshot that leaves no print— no motive, modus operandi, no finger-trace behind, no black. So many through the crust via …
Stand on the sidewalk with a cup of warm soup, curry, the color of wheat in late August, and let yourself be seen. It’s the currency of the street. Wear …
No members, no elements to speak of. With nothing left to say, she resides in the white …
It would take jack-hammers to find that other-self. Saw-shrieks, elegies for taste—whiplash, moan & scald. This body is something Giacometti sculpted: wax & molten steel, the …
In the heat of chance, in the cold sweetness of rules, my son slaps out rhythm. Rock Paper Scissors. Does the hand quicken the mind? He is a mystic, a prisoner gambling for bread. His rock …
Everything comes down to numbers but nothing is finite, not me waking at 3:47 a.m. and not fifty feet of power cord snaking out my window. Can sleep be factored or does it dream its own dark …
I have been the summoning lip of a Flemish hunger, a school of limber …
1 In my dream an elderly man climbs through the window wearing only boxers and a threadbare tank top. His hair is dripping and it appears as though he swam a great distance. He opens …
Three green doors in the falling apart shed. I put one on the stream and wave as it leaves. Someone will knock miles from here, and go under, and live in rooms of water, take your boots off …
Nothing lived on land, nothing had crawled out of the shallow sea. Because they have no hard parts, it’s rare to find the fossil of a jelly. The farm boy digging a new duck pond exposed thousands, …
Well I’ve been afraid of changin’ cuz I’ve built my life around you —Fleetwood Mac Today in the car I heard the …
In 1896—nearly fifty years after Melville’s masterpiece, three years before Freud’s Dream and my grandpa’s journey across the Pacific— a storm shoved seven tons of white blob onto a St. …
Darwin could not believe an insect would visit a blossom that had no reward so insisted this orchid must withhold the nectar deep inside. But he was deceived as well. Which brings us up-to-date— …
Think of the consummate folly of attempting to go away from here ! When the constant endeavor should be to get nearer and nearer here . …
Madonna and Saint Anne, Da Vinci It will not work. He’ll never fold back into you, body curled tight, a kitten in sleep. He leans— seems always to lean—away. Everything you do …
for R.P. We came wanting the ‘marvelous knowledge’ the blue evening eggs, radiant desirable as alphabets beginning and ending with the letter ‘A.’ The eggs. Prodigious. Round as the sphere of …
They say if you just strap weights around your ankles and wrists and carry on you will be stronger. They say if you just strap weights to your earlobes and …
Before unlocking the door, Derek likes staring in the portal window for a long time, watching Jack watching Jill as they huddle in their chairs near the giant monitor. They wear shirts in …
As if what’s said here is not my heart’s wreck. As if turbulence did not author the need. As if this scribbling were not last council. As if this sheet would be found in the breach. As if you, …
Before words, there was the language of the mark. We moved a stick along the dirt and drew a line to the end. Our wild flickers ink-streaked a page, symbols like the stars’ orphaned radiance …
There’s no one who could be everything for me. That’s what I tell you walking up Seventh, and I think it sounds good. The flea-market has just opened. You hold up a mirror for fifteen dollars, …
It’s the part of the film ( Charade ) after Audrey Hepburn has lumped ice cream on Cary Grant’s suit ( though she doesn’t offer to lick it off ) so he takes a shower fully dressed in her …
Beside the copper bell and hammer, a tea-brown gas mask stares out, left eye cracked. A tangle of rope, blackened and frayed, lies pressed under glass like a lock of hair. What doesn't burn …
I am thankful today for thumb and finger chafed raw from lifting you, each blood- dripped iridescent figure, between saws of teeth and under cheek, laying each in a lidded bucket atop twisted, …
Should we have stayed at home and thought of here? —Elizabeth Bishop, “Questions of Travel” Something that …
Day One: June 16 I arrived at the front gate of the fort, as per the instructions in my acceptance letter. Fort William Henry is a curious anomaly, plunked-down amid …
But sidewalks and those who use them are not passive beneficiaries of safety or helpless victims of danger. Sidewalks, their bordering uses, and their users, are active participants in the drama of …
Because my mother has had a stroke, because my mother did not speak for a year, because she was temporarily paralyzed and now is in a wheelchair, because she had to relearn everything: how …
I am alone in the nightclub’s kitchen when it happens, an industrial kitchen, all stainless steel: a wall of broilers across from me, a huge stove beside that, Friolator nearby, deep …
One morning the workmen digging the new lime kiln found a set of five iron keys. The keys were black, heavy, with curious ridges half worn down. Instead of tossing them onto the debris, …
Nora managed to scrape together enough for a joint from her mom’s stash. Her mom kept it hidden under her bed on a silver tray, which, in better times, displayed a tea set. The tray’s …
I have been a carousel man for thirty-three years. I work the “B&D Carousell” on Coney Island—one of the originals manufactured by William F. Mangels—which my father operated …
Dream of Flight No flight experience, yet he is required by necessity to fly, the fourth nightmare for a blind man awaiting a sustained form of lift in the darkness, a form he can …
She sold exotic vegetables and fruit. In a ritzy L. A. office, she took phone orders from hundreds of grocery stores in Florida and Key West. She was enamored of her boss, the woman who had actually …
I am wearing my Don’t Leave Me t-shirt to my blind date. We have 250 of them. Red background. Black writing, in big block letters across the front. Mel and I came up with the idea …
Pain. It is finally, totally, completely about pain. They want to hurt you. That is all they want. Listen to me. They will give you and your friends thirty minutes. They will give you an hour to …
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