Dale, Author at U n b r o k e n

Issue 31: Revelations CONTENTS

Brandel France de Bravo

The Lounge Chair Does the Work All the chairs committed to doing the work. It’s time each of us interrogates our role in this household. But no one had any questions. Only statements released like shiny foil balloons that rise in the air and tremble against the ceiling. “As someone who is bi-positional…” started the […]

Humboldt Falcon

Brain Waves I run into Brian from the analytics department in the breakroom and ask him about his weekend. Hold on, he says. I just need a minute. He opens his skull and takes his brain out. He opens the microwave and puts his brain in. Thirty seconds should do it, he says, and presses […]

Beth Dulin

This is Not a Love Poem A pile of dead bees collecting in the corner of the windowsill. The sun dropping low in the sky so early now in evening. Remembering a white horse named Guardian Angel. Listening to a telemarketer from the Midwest quoting the book of Job. Setting fire to a pile of […]

Mike Cole

Tribute The man for whom the tribute was held was a poet who smoked filterless Camels and played the banjo in a Bluegrass band in which the mandolin player was blind. The poet celebrated in each of his poems the way light if it shines from the right angle and is accompanied by the right […]

Ivan de Monbrison

A prose poem in Russian and English The blood of hell in my sex, I slowly die. Maybe my mother was right, to know nothing is better. Yesterday in the garden of the bones, I picked my father’s head, and put it on me like a hat. The blood of hell in my brain is […]

J.R. Solonche

Ten Dollars I gave ten dollars today to a homeless woman. She was young, in her twenties. She had a dog and a cat. Nine weeks old she said. It was hot. The three of them were sitting on the sidewalk on Fourteenth Street. It was the sunny side of Fourteenth Street. Why she didn’t […]

Michele Rappoport

Trace I have no website. There is no way to find me. I once was a thumbprint on a form. It asked if I had done criminal things. Twice, again. The search came back clean, but I know better. I sit on a picket fence like a cactus wren. I feel nothing. My foot is […]

Lian Sing

Revelations The day is a series of slippages. In the cupboard of china sits the silence of unsung lifetimes. We are not owed sunlight. Every day, I am an animal. Desire is a gift, not a chalice to be filled. In the twilight of a life, shadows must be another kind of sea stretching towards […]

Robert L. Penick

Compleat History He lived this way for a number of years: Coffee in the morning, evening news each night at six o’clock. In between, work at a job both necessary and unimportant, with lunch purchased mainly from vending machines and consumed in proximity to unhappy yet complacent people. AA meetings were on Friday nights and […]

Cherie Hunter Day

A Capella Sunshine Ghosts are given three days a year for singing. They shed the bundles they’ve been carrying all year and look for the brightest, loudest colors. In this crowd their bones come clean. The dust clears from their throats and they can once again harmonize. Small voice or big voice: there’s no reason […]

H. E. Fisher

Vigil: Women’s Bathroom in the Heart Wing of the Hospital When I walk in, there are two women stripped down, washing their pits and vaginas at the double-sink with industrial paper towels and dispenser soap. I am also here on a break from bedside: can’t hold it in any longer. The door closes behind me […]

H. E. Fisher

Letter to My Friend Stuck at the Top of a Ferris Wheel —for Charis Conn thirty years after the publication of her story “Octopus” in Harper’s You called to reassure me that Raymond Carver was okay, how he said his last years were “gravy” and read me his poem in the New Yorker. It wasn’t […]

Pat Hale

The Kiss It’s the wine, surely the wine, or the warmth of the room—so many people!—or the tightness of that dress around her waist, something makes her giddy, fills her with the light shining all around her, reflecting off the red and green balls she’s arranged in that cut glass bowl. Wanting everyone to know […]

Brett Warren

A man was murdered on Willow Street where not a willow can be found—just a strip of dealerships, countertop and carpet stores, the kind of semi-feral place you might wind up if you need some damage hammered out and painted over. The paper said it happened in broad daylight, called it brazen. The word brawl […]

Robin Turner

To Help You Find Me Not in the noise. Not there. Not ever. Not in the anguish bound to break us. Search instead your labyrinth heart, all its crusted corridors of ash and shadow, until you come to the clearing you loved as a child. The firefly light there. Bottle caps and kite string. Bicycles […]

Christy Prahl

The Pinking Hour This is my song to the quiet morning. To waking in the dark when most are still sleeping, save the revelers heading home from yellow beer and a clip of conversation they hoped might lead to sex. We form a sisterhood, we salted thieves of time. The early shifters, tucking into uniform. […]

Paulette K. Fire

I do not love dogs I do not love dogs. Dogs growl and lunge and bite. They can rip your throat out. I once saw that happen in a movie. People who love dogs say that it’s like having a child. It is not like having a child. These people should have a child, then […]

Richard Baldasty

The Veteran April, then March. The year moves backward. So go the clocks. It had been early evening. Now tocsins sound for lunch. “The maid was in the garden,” three little girls intone, “hanging out the clothes. Along came a blackbird.” Its wings flap like a portent, though nothing dire as Poe’s raven. Nevermore, that […]

Ferral Willcox

Conversation with Joe I was walking along 17th Street with my bike just past the church at the corner of 17th and Sansom when I saw you. I pulled over, pulled in my bike, held it somewhat like a shield. I was thinking it had been a long time… You said: It’s been a long […]

Ben Kassoy

Jimmy It must have been Jimmy’s idea to go into the woods behind the pool where the girl would untie her bikini and reveal herself to us, because it wasn’t mine. And it always seems like the best friend dies at the end of the story but in this one he dies near the beginning, […]

Jedediah Smith

The Quality of Mercy Mercy fruit only grows on the sides of slow-moving trains. Its vines wind over boxcars and along the ground leaving sprouts which latch onto other trains. To blossom, it must pass through a Sierra snow cloud, and the perfume of its bloom will draw buffalo herds out from hollow hills to […]

Olga Dermott-Bond

Virginia Woolf comes around unannounced Virginia takes her coat off. I make her tea. She removes the stones from her pockets, arranging them carefully in size order on my kitchen table. Each vowel she utters is like a Fabergé egg. She asks, what it’s like to live with someone like me? I lift the stones […]

Benjamin Niespodziany

A Turkey in the Context of Bowling after Mark Leidner [1] He wrote a poem in the brim of his cowboy hat. His math was all wrong. The song was something like a loaded coal train. A winter spritzer. A felony of talons. His spread of weather was a crime of gossip. Sure, the piano […]

Brian Builta

Dear Austin, Even though you’ll be dead again tomorrow, your classmates pitched in to buy you a ring for the finger you no longer have. For a while, I fingered the rosary your friends brought back from Rome. It smelled of rosewood and jawbreakers. Still, that first Christmas, I cried at the foot of the […]

Geula Geurts

The Gifts One man bought me a set of knives. Pink & yellow blades. To make me a good woman. Kitchen-sharp. He liked apple pie, the butter of my thigh. I sliced my webbed toes instead. Left the waddle, learned to run. Another man bought me a stone for sharpening the blades. This fable is […]

Oz Hardwick

Swarm Bodies break up every day, but still we’re surprised when it happens to us, and we struggle for an appropriate image. Let’s try this for size: a beehive in a golden field, the Sun low, and a pandemonium of urgent buzzing. There’s honey fit for gods and wax to light lovers to that room […]

Jay Kelly

/ Speaks Remember only this. The stillborn are still born. Yes, I came and went without breath or wail, or sup of milk at your readied breast. I didn’t wrap my hand around your little finger, yet we know what we are to each other. You had reasons for not naming me but were so […]

Ian Willey

My Death I ran into My Death sitting at a wrought-iron table outside a café, reading the paper. What’s new? I asked, sitting across from him. Do you really want to know? he replied. Never mind, I said. What are you going to order? This place has the best brownies, he said. That and a […]

Susan L. Leary

Cholesteatoma My brother was born with a tumor wrapped around the bones in his right ear. The tiny structure a snail’s shell, this time with the snail inside. As he gets older, the tumor puts pressure on the bones & they break into a shrunken tuba or finch’s claw, something to move across the board […]

Leigh Chadwick

Hospital Poem I wake up as myself and then wake up as another me and then another me says hello to the first or second or eighty-fifth or three millionth me. A storm brews in the lunchroom, chipping the coffee pot, knocking over a chair. I am wearing a gown covered in charcoal. The walls […]

Lucas Clark

The Marvel of Beauty There were two horses wearing bedsheets over their heads. In their pasture, which they could not see, there was a breeze that shuffled the strands of grass; there were crickets hopping and catching a ride on the breeze; there were frogs who sat below the breeze and the grass, sending their […]

Jo Gatford

Inside the whale Inside the whale it is quiet and wet and warm; the pressure of the water outside womb-tight white noise. You panicked, briefly, when the baleen closed behind you, but then it dives, long and sinuous, and being frightened seems unnecessary—irreverent, to disturb this temple—like screaming in a library. Kissing at a funeral. […]