Winter 2017
Three
I. monkeys who forgot they’re monkeys, focused on some sweetness that perished there A long time ago— Depraved. for a firmament everywhere, purple and aimless. II. I looked at you in the blood-red lights So I asked, Blanket me, Ursa Major, by our nectarean memories of childhood, where, through our old home’s vents, we slept… Read More Three
Contact
After his wife died, he tried to get her back. Of course. He’d loved her madly and he tasted her loss each morning with his coffee, settled in next to it each night in the king bed they used to share. Grief hollowed out his chest and nested there, laid eggs. He could not help… Read More Contact
The Dreamer and the Rabbit
The Dreamer surveyed the rows of purple flowers with a practiced eye, devouring each neat line in the falling light and drinking in the thick perfume of petunias. He remained motionless but for the rhythmic scans of his eyes until darkness flooded the tired earth. Slowly gathering his old muscles and pulling his old body… Read More The Dreamer and the Rabbit
Poughkeepsie
Dawn breaks like an egg on the highway, Light spilling through the trees to rest on the blue bruised half-moons beneath her eyes. She keeps her foot against the pedal, one hand in the fold of her jacket pocket. Her cell phone buzzes, her gut twists, and his voice echoes: “a house, a yard, maybe… Read More Poughkeepsie
Yours to Own
It is a rare body that distinctly displays the vices of its keeper. But here is one that does just that, filling in the chipping plastic of the chair to Dad’s right. He has the limbs of a thin man—tendons, bouncing and twitching in ridges, running toward his ulnas; calves, beneath khaki cargo pockets, reaching… Read More Yours to Own
We Been Here Before
With silvered hair and shit-brown eyes, y’all jeered again – from way downtown, this quarter-nigger’s here again. Your grin-smacked mug and pig-skinned palms took field, D-line, and spit some twice-black hatred through your beard again. I’m twice as fast and half as black, six first-downs proved, but shutdowns moved aside when you appeared again. This… Read More We Been Here Before
