ISSUE #12
Matthew Olzmann
My Favorite Tinfoil Hat
In a field of snow, it’s a legitimate option to see
the tracks made by the myth but never
the myth itself. There’s nothing there.
No mysterious creature to ravage the livestock,
assign paw prints to the barn doors,
or claw marks to the black walnut trees…
Dennis Hinrichsen
[Toast with Honey and Cold War on It]
as I feast so I am feasted upon by what I ingest // mouth
chewing hard // sucking marrow // sips and great gulps
of air working me like an ocean wave // fission and
fusion happening all at once // all the sweet liqueurs //…
Lily Greenberg
To the boy who thinks his body, like a woman,
a thing to be controlled. Purify by fire,
you say. Pain: of the mind. Discipline:
island in the distance to which you swim
daily. Get out shivering: I have done
what I did not want to do. Someone’s
father is proud, but not yours. Whose…
Meg Stout
Hinge
In memory’s eye, I imagine my grandmother,
lithe as a willow tree, swinging
the vacuum across a high pile
carpet, washing a dish in the sink
overlooking the suburban marsh
she never visited. Her life a stop sign…
Hattie Jean Hayes
Trip
Voices muddied by a screen door, the memory
of music: you send me photos from the front porch. You’re reading.
For fourteen months I’ve known exactly where to find you. It’s April, and it’s October. It’s
spring, and it’s September. You are down a road I’ve walked before. You smell like grass….
Meghan Sterling
The Weight of a Cumulonimbus is One Million Tons
Morning is a drawn-in breath. Morning is
an old boat, drummed out of its mooring,
left to sink or drift. The dread inside the shell,
the mantle and its empty rainbow. The dawn shatters…
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Charles Baxter
The Last Sign
A weekend drive: and we got lost just west
Of Waconia, near the lake whose name you couldn’t
Pronounce, though we knew it sounded like “Whisby” or
“Wherby,” and around then, cresting over a hill
We came to a green stretch of somebody’s farm,
The grass so saturated it might have been boiled
In paint…
Debra Allbery
Incunabula
Ridge and hollow, where I began:
Hollow said holler, creek said crick.
Every word my father spoke
spelled itself, unspooled within…
Kathleen Hellen
—my mother, Asian squatting
between the crown and pier of limbs,
the architecture—my mother
like the side of an arc, bending at the hips,
and everything up underneath…
Julia Watson
THINGS THAT LAST TO 15
,…An angleworm, a chicken, a fox
in good health. Pink peonies, latched
roots on an iron gate. The poison
of monkshood in frost. A Lenten
rose, a red car: its idle hum…
Jen Ryan Onken
Ode to Ambivalence
Drop it. Slowly. Let care go
like a dirty hankie. Don’t
pick it up. Who needs chivalry?
They don’t see you: you’ve let
your hair go grey. Who cares?
Lose four committees. Lose raises
after earning your degree. Lose…
Victoria Korth
The Curator’s Notes, by Robin Rosen Chang – A Review
The Curator’s Notes is confident, unapologetic in its display of intimacy, emotional directness and imagistic lucidity. The protruding spinous processes of a dying mother’s bowed back become “the chamber of a nautilus,” one that “spirals inward / toward oblivion.” Rosen Chang’s choices are succinctly rendered, precise, convincing. But more than that, they are also capacious…