Featured – swamp pink

Dieback

An American sentence acrostic after Lucille Clifton In rooting the tree, I planted the seeds of disease.One key lime shed blooms, coiled its leaves, spent a brittleweek or two brooming the sky clean of clouds. I grieved for the wood that had to be taken against its livingwill. It couldn’t remain, not even as...

Close at Hand

Transplanted in the woods, the iris rose from swords to fill the garden with color neither lavender nor periwinkle but close. They smelled of grapes if you came near, but few would, afraid of forests and ghosts, spirits from centuries ago, from where no one exactly knew. The rhizomes had seemed a cross between stone and rope, some kind of chord...

Connective Tissue

As if a tongue was more than muscle, silver. As if silver wasn’t muscle. Each split into a fork like snakes our mothers taught us to fear no matter how many times people from the city came to show us we should love them. Too strong a verb? Say then admire, appreciate. Look how snakes never sing, or speak, and feel no...

The Grown-Up Hour

It was one of those neighborhoods in suburban Ontario where rows of identical townhouses faced four-square on a central park, a nice one, well-outfitted with see-saws and a flying fox and tennis courts for the older kids. A kind of planned community type thing, where mothers stood chatting with babies in slings on their chests...

Aubade with Music from Selling Sunset

For so long mornings occurred without you. No leveled up karma boss, no ready set money—you couldn’t get out of bed, true colors in a get it, get it hurricane. Your dreams were a sleeping bodybeside you, back gently rising as queen light streaked through the shades. Battle on, the day chirpedfrom the hall. Play the game but break...

Accomplishments

When she was in fifth grade, Jennifer set the world record for Most Pogo Stick Jumps in One Minute. At age twelve, she swam the state’s best time for the 100-meter butterfly (Girls, 11–12 years old), a record that still stands today. She graduated high school a year early, was class valedictorian, and got accepted...

Angel Soft

He could ditch the whole damn pack, right here in the dumpster behind Circle K. All twelve rolls, plastic wrapped. He could walk home in peace. Well, at least with that dignity Coach is always going on about: Chin up, both on and off the field. Whether you played in Friday’s game or not. No...

Grajaú

Grajaú is a place that molds around the edges. Beneath the cracks in the wallpaper that no one ever bothers to fix, the walls turn black then ooze and the dirt gets kicked up from under the floorboards no matter how many times they are polished to a shine. Up on their wooden perches, the...

The Wait

The summer my father rented the house the color of hay, was the summer the whales grew feet. On our third night in the rental, while we lay awake in strange, stale beds, a male humpback crept out of the ocean and up the rocky embankment and into our backyard. He collapsed between the shed...

Pantoum Post Two C-sections and a Stillbirth

Bladder to uterus to bowel, soft and cinched– Doc says, nothing to undo that your body won’t redo. Womb a knot in the cradle of my pelvis, scars stitch and tie and tie again. Doc says, when it’s undone, your body will redo  all the places opened like a mouth,  scars stitch and tie and tie again. How many fingers does...

It Reminded Me of Something

It happened all the time / It didn’t happen at all. Either way, I wanted my mother to leave him. In a darkened room my art professor showed us slides of a house halved with a power saw. A slit of light shone through the exterior wall. It reminded me of something, I didn’t know...

O it's on

Cute rips filters through the aquavelvetSlit though without me slinging sodden clamsOr pushed up or even convenientlyFlattened. Same me flatters by dressing justlyReady for that laugh, it gets meThick like the mixed heightOf it. Looks almost real likeExpensive touching. But I lose it and can’tMulch it, that’s my flaw.My head attached to my body, or...