Category: Uncategorized

American Pastoral by John Sibley Williams Again, the wind sings the laundry from the line.  Bleached of our stains, baptized by soap & sun,    by a once mighty river gone arroyo & a handed-  down washboard bartered for a grandmother’s   dreams, what we’ve worn to keep the world  from our bodies eddies out…

They Buried Him In The Sand             For John Henry the man and all the unnamed men buried at the Great Bend Tunnel, Talcott, West Virginia   Ghosts graze the land, and the grass— it tumbles off the lip into that old roadside tangle barbed wire kudzu caution tape soft sinkhole muck…

  whisper & smoke by henry 7. reneau, jr after “The Urban Wild Coyote Project” by Mandy-Suzanne Wong   old man coyote   //   demigod/shape-  shifter   /  dons a missionary’s collar/   & snakeskin boots//    cocks his head/   a God engine of whisper  & smoke   //   a politician’s wink &…

Poem by Maxwell Stenson This morning we will be simple. We will collect splayed seconds, our fingers anticipating caffeine.   We will offer nothing in way of robinsong branches, motions Aeolian about them.   There’s little time for casual sublimity, for drowned blues beside a broken river.   Steel offices, shield, crucible or desktop: for…

Thompson: Submachine Gun or Seafood House by Henry Cherry    The cable to helium, the lightning mustard, corded in excelsior. Wings spun of caramel, fellow witnesses to the descent, beyond the linens. Disrupted in popped corks, unstrung tennis racquets, woods layered with pine needles. The sweeping falter of arrhythmia pursed in ruby painted lips, a…

notes from the understory (layer 34, direction one) by Rusty Morrison  Blue mountain, black cloven hoof, red tint at the rupture of  temporality, green tint on hidden immoralities,    a naked knowable, a virginal myth, an iris of the owl’s eye focuses  on the direction of an iambic laugh,    a secret I hear myself…

No Mary in Khashuri by Jacob Reina   I remember at the end of June—when our van broke down, In the distance, foothills peered as a prelude to the Caucasus, The sky came sprinkling down before it blew on a baritone;   I crossed the little concrete bridge over the canal’s rushing water, Gazed straight…

Sea Change by P.Q.R. Anderson Dredged to the accreted gristle-rock, resolving as sand again in the gills the sea is turbid silver, attended by birds of the by-catch, not a net cast to the other side, but like the last stone, overkill. These chrome fish brought to burn their gills in air, winched aboard, become…

Exit Strategy by Daniel Reiner   I watched over Linderhof’s shoulder as he focused the security camera. The image on the monitor was not unexpected: a dead man. I’d seen countless and there was nothing unusual about this one: average height, average weight. He was on the younger side, but if the typical life expectancy…