Poetry

POETRY By Russell Karrick Perched in the branch­es of the avocado tree, the chick­ens are almost asleep. My son lifts his head from my chest and points to them. Each day I carry him through the yard at dusk and we hunt for sea­son­al trea­sures. Tonight, he spies amanita muscaria…

POETRY By Kelly Gray Most of the people in the restau­rant have cancer. The wait­ress­es have been hired to float their soft palms across scalps as they walk down aisles pouring soup with too much butter because it is too late to care about anybody’s heart. Better to…

POETRY By Jessica Good­fel­low To write about suf­fer­ing you need a dic­tio­nary. You don’t have one, but you have the inter­net which is, maybe, better for suf­fer­ing. Acci­den­tal­ly, you look up suf­frutes­cent instead. You read: par­tial­ly or slight­ly woody; sub­shrub­by. Sub­shrub­by; you are delight­ed. You…

POETRY By Ben­jamin Faro We, broth­ers, were but boom-swings born of unnamed storms—eighty-eight knot gales that tested Mother’s savvy. Born at the peak of twenty-nine ‑foot swells, we left her con­cussed and rud­der­less, unsteer­ing in our unsaid sud­den­ness, pum­meled by the fetch and wind shear. Shaken by…

POETRY By Ben­jamin Faro On a finger of con­ti­nent between golden, earth ‑laden waters, where sunset is brighter even than L.A. and the Huang Hue never stops arriv­ing, I turn west to reject the mouth as a place of expul­sion. Why is it called a river mouth if a mouth…

POETRY By Sarah Dick­en­son Snyder Post­marked in Santa Fe: the sky is elec­tric blue with quiet  clouds banked against the endless moun­tains.   From the West Coast: an ocean is an ocean,  water swelling forever.   Maybe she travels for a new lan­guage. She knows how to pro­nounce the past…

POETRY By Terence Degnan dear Palin­drome, fuck// dear Parkinson’s,// Dianne is in the hos­pi­tal again// we are sitting on her dog, Sam// before she was taken away she walked over and gifted me one of those grip­pers my old man used to keep on his…

POETRY By Charles Byrne even pre-prepan­dem­ic, we were bubbled: Netflix- & Amazon sealed: pix­e­lat­ed min­is­cule-screen freeze-frames: air encir­cled in  plastic air bubbles with a tiny black box at the bottom: dis­crete  behav­ior­ist levers to parcel out the dopamine drip: our secure  little bubbles: gossip is…

POETRY By Kellam Ayres He sits shotgun in the car he’d sold to Maris for a dollar while she drives him to the hos­pi­tal. It’s spring­time. He holds a dish­tow­el dark with blood between his hands. Watch­ing a pair of car­di­nals, he’d shat­tered a coffee mug on the…

POETRY By Luke Johnson and Megan Mer­chant For I,   I thought of you and bullets and the husk of ruin we are feeding our chil­dren, saying swallow, it will make you strong, in the end, but I know. When I sat the other day with…