Issue 29
In long-ago day we crawled out of the sea, sister. I stood upright, configured a hand arched a foot and ran. You stayed beast, grew…
Gather up memories
of when the earth was freshly
born, when lakes covered deserts
I hate being weary.
My favorite thing to do is hide in bed. That’s a weary way of saying I’m exhausted.
I shouldn’t be hiding in the background, an understudy in my own grief. And I do want to be there, but I don’t know how to support him. Work, I tell my feet. Move! I stay rooted to the spot.
First, you are a source of luminous wonder
Your brilliance fills the sky.
Then, a seizure of darkness
Collapses your vertebral tower and boats sink
He gets off his bicycle and sits down next to her. Who is she traveling with? Where is she from? The questions pour like water.
Enchantment is easy: our wood stove, shadow contrast of icing pine. The way color floods each
sunset until everywhere rainbows, streaks of salmon crimson so beautiful you never think storm.
On a street painted with the steps
of the hurried and the dreaming, I am
a whisper among shouts.
After Cecilia Woloch Surely, there were bears starved by fire. Beacons of the sky’s assault and the rain that would never come. The sound of…
Let the elephant approach unharmed,
expose endless rows of cut cane feathered like birds.
Let her taste her small puja of sweetness.
They had already booked a non-refundable flight, so they decided to come visit us anyway. They told us a week after the fire, and a month later they arrived.
After my son died, I could sense the discomfort when acquaintances ran into me somewhere…. The string that connected me to others was pulled tight, straining. They could sense the tautness, sense that my connection to them, to this world, was close to snapping.