Golem the Famulus – Jenny Mary Brown
Wednesday, January 20, 2016 12:05 — 1 Comment
The new foal is late. Our mare’s at 357 days. Each day my dad checks her udders for waxing to find them dry. When she is ready, she’ll rub her nose all over his beard, refuse her oats, and stare into the abyss. She’ll lose her early-labor jitters eventually, settling down. She doesn’t need help. If I could, though, I’d sort some Georgia clay, measure each lump, each grain to transmute into cells, and risk my life in evocation. I’d chant names until the right one, the name of god, comes. I’d bring the Golem north to serve only her, […]
Rapid Transit – Kristine Ong Muslim
Monday, December 14, 2015 11:19 — 1 Comment
For you, it is always rush hour, always the same hydraulic hiss of electric train doors tight-lipped about their vacuum, their hull swollen with immediacy, their carriage smothered by your restlessness, always the same familiar melodic ding of train doors clamping shut their seamless traction, their gaskets and threaded metal joints— the slow wear and tear prodding you along, for all time oblivious to your aimless lurching forward to whatever city you have fled from this time. Chafed by friction, the rails hold up, hold down your roaring part of the world.
Two Poems – Patrick Ahlers
Friday, December 11, 2015 11:37 — 4 Comments
Introduction:Â My name is Patrick Ahlers. Outside of the occasional anger-poem, I didn’t put much in the way of pen to paper during most of my adult life. Then, in my early thirties, I found out that I have cancer. A little while later, my already grim prognosis was shredded even more to bits when they found the ivy-like reach of the spread of the disease. As I snuggle so closely to death, I find one of the easiest ways to be able to look at my wife and daughters’ beautiful faces – to be able to look at my life […]
Prose Poem for Ardent Stamp Collectors – Melina Papadopoulos
Monday, November 30, 2015 10:21 — 0 Comments
Nobody knows why Tom collected only stamps with flowers on them. Perhaps he spent his final lucid days in his sunroom, penning letters to women who once courted him with their silence. When they spoke, their voices came in wispy penmanship, the ends of their S’s tucked meekly into the letters preceding them, like smooth legs folded under sheer camisole. Maybe he never wrote to anyone at all but simply mused over what it would feel like to gaze on, upward and unblinking like a sunflower and still get lost in the mail. Tom’s collection was abundant but not exhaustive. […]
The Seeker – Peycho Kanev
Monday, November 30, 2015 10:18 — 1 Comment
Looking for a word to describe the world tonight, the way the dark takes hold of the candle’s halo and declares its victory, or a word for the densest darkness oozing oily out of the chimney like the one in Dachau and a third word for the gloomy man standing at the doorway of a dilapidated house and humming a tune for morning to come.
Curiouser and curiouser – Bryan Merck
Tuesday, November 17, 2015 10:56 — 0 Comments
I am become. I am becoming. I cannot not be outside of the field. I travel through an inescapable ether. Around and through my body. The Kingdom of Heaven supercedes and suffuses fundamentally the spinning structure of my elements. My conflagration of cells. My point of being. My now. My life now is as brilliant as a welder’s arc, an amazing basic moment of contact, joining. I live within it and I help it maintain. (Lay your words down, brother. Tell about it. It. Work it out. Lay down your righteous word. Change reality. Loose your fate to a Spring […]
At the Allegro – Alex Gallo-Brown
Monday, November 2, 2015 11:18 — 0 Comments
On the eighth anniversary of my father’s death, I come to the Allegro for coffee, the last, best hope for remembering my father in the cafés and restaurants of this city. I have never had much love for the Allegro. But I do have love for a memory. I was twenty-one then, living in an apartment off the Ave. when one morning I met my father for coffee. Six weeks later, I would leave Seattle for college and never see him alive again. But on the morning that I remember it is a normal day in Seattle circa 2007 and we are sitting together in […]
Two Poems – Benjamin David Scott
Tuesday, October 20, 2015 16:56 — 0 Comments
Naturally icehouse, parking-lot, icebox he gave me a thumbs up from the front of the classroom chewing cud and corn and wheat in the maize at Chickory Hills, Oklahoma I played a game about where I’d like to die I told myself anywhere but Michigan I have a cut on my lip and its blood stained my blouse and this toothache is keeping me up Papergirl She told me about when she was a child, and was evicted from her home. It must have been mid-November. All of her belongings were strung in the front yard, and under […]
Three Poems – Hannah Jove
Tuesday, October 6, 2015 9:51 — 0 Comments
Riddled You bring home a carpeted cat tower even though we don’t have any pets. It stands by the window and smells faintly of potpourri. After a few weeks I stop asking about it and new acquaintances are too polite to question it as if it’s a vacant crib and not something you found on a curb. Your love turns into inaccessible stairwells in a building that the city knocks down. I try to pull you back into the hemisphere of our story where we were always wet and forgiving and dizzy but you can’t look me in the eyes […]
Three Poems – Johnny Horton
Monday, October 5, 2015 11:42 — 0 Comments
Lovebirds What we declare often sounds bizarre. Cowbirds sing titi, titi, titi. European starlings laugh out loud. As mother of Imperial Rome, Livia kept nightingales caged. Captivity inspires beautiful songs. The New Zealand kakapo digs an amphitheater in the hills, transmits beat-boxing for as far as four miles. Most passionate singers will not fly off. Elvis gurgled like a meadowlark, shook his pelvis for the chicks. Certain chickens hatch without a cock. Let’s talk turkey: Great tits eat bats. We make cocktail hour happy. Spread the word by tweet. My turtle dove knows the way home by heart. […]
What am I?
Bioluminescent eye
That sees by the shine
Of its own light. Lies
Blind me. I am the seventh human sense
And my stepchild,
Consequence;
Scientists can't find me.
Januswise I make us men;
Glamour
Was my image then—
Remind me:
The awful fall up off all fours
From the forest
To the hours…
Tick, Tock: Divine me.
-- Richard Kenney
