Featured – Page 36 – swamp pink

Hypothesis (II)

It’s all art, I think. This disappearing we are doing. Unpacking ourselves into the future. At night the wind whips at the pecan tree, the one long dead and strangled in ivy. What wouldn’t be brought down by all that green, all that gesture toward growth. There’s something to be said here of re-birth, but...

Morgantown, West Virginia

The neighborhood Wi-Fi network list runs from FuckPad to Xfinity. Across the street, a dog won’t stop barking. It’s cold and he whines like a whimpering child. Maybe it’s the sound of the train whistle that upsets him. We’re far from needing the warning in this bed that smells of fabric softener and the soft...

How Do We Get to the Sun

We satellite & globally position & triangulate echoes. Bodies revolve ..around bodies & we listen to what’s obscured. We hear ourselves, listen to the mirror arrays aimed ..to soak the sun out of heaven & sustain the revolutions per minute carrying us door to door, out of windows, ..over the shoulders of mountain passes. Like...

An Orchard Is a Forest We Broke

Walk with me the rows and whir: poor trees poor trees poor wildness clipped, fruit plucked, ugly branches robbed of the weight of little animals. Pears rot around the roots, blind black eyes in yellow skin infolding, eaten from inside by neglect and wet. Look down the row and earth bends away from them toward...

Late Afternoon (Delight) Flight by Matthias Göritz

so long the day yet it’s already almost evening the summer lies over the landscape grassy fields, single houses, landscape Still what’s up with living the life? Puffed up like a monstrous blimp it moves forward on its forefeet At noon noises flew through the house The sounds of lilies spirit levels, dragonflies the wind...

Litany (Easter)

River of the flooded banks, of water muddied ………..to mahogany like over-steeped tea. River where, come summer, my sister & I would float ………..our child-bodies over the deep place by the bend, reach our feet down ………..to find the sandy bottom and fail. River: fastened between banks by piles of shells ………..the otters left: stellular,...

Two Rooms

We made a child in one, plans against disaster in the other. Leaves curled beyond every window with the same casual alarms, and somewhere a peacock, yes, a male with a mewling cry, hopped into a fir, dragging its impossible skirts while we closed the one door between us and nursed the wound to what...

After the Fire, Dressing

You used to dress monochromatic (or rather, cinematic?) in what the town called your black widow suits: black cardigans w/wide leg pants & webs of scarves to hide your neck, a casket of long long underthings— but now you wear what the old ladies bag & bring for you: Polyester peasant shirt with full blown...

Conspirators

December 10, 2019

Halfway through the drive from his place in Maine to his ex-wife’s house near Boston, Nate remembers the mirror. Eight feet tall, a gilt-rimmed rectangle leaning against the wall of the consignment shop, it had caught the three of them, Nate and Kirsten and six-month-old Violet, as they rushed by. They’d just moved from their...

Good Girl

December 10, 2019

Because her parents are getting divorced and because she is already a regular fixture in the McKeown household, Hannah is invited along on Fern McKeown’s family vacation. It’s just Hannah and Fern, and Fern’s undivorced parents, Monica and Greg. For one July week they lounge around their hotel, spending the glaring afternoons in the shade...

Almost Never

December 10, 2019

I prepared to mother the shadows, shoulder the night, sing the bones to sleep. I prepared to calve as iceberg calves, splitting myself in two. I prepared to birth as glacier births, carving lake beds with my feet. The world was fragile. I touched it like a mother. I lifted spiders from the drain, tenderly...

Dear Shadows

December 10, 2019

The last time Katie had talked to Colin Reynolds had been in the spring of 2000 in a sad little rental house with a banana-colored refrigerator, sparse lighting, and abundant water bugs. They’d ended up there on the west end of town after a party. Their conversation—brief, inconsequential yet overinflated—had been a prelude. Soon thereafter,...