The middle ages saw madness as blessed, a condition of increased spiritual insight. To see the unseen was divine. Reason alone could not approach mystery; therefore, the privileging of un-reason. “Faith is to believe what you do not see; the reward of this faith is to see what you believe.” (St. Augustine, Sermones, 4:1:1) Under […]
Author Archives: Dale
The Smell of Yesterday by Craig Dowd
It was close to midnight when he climbed from his grave at Fifty-Ninth Street, another policy sold. The mourners were gone, only a stray cat crying outside the corner bakery that couldn’t sleep; resurrections here are old hat. Fourth Avenue was pointing to the Narrows, cold and deep. In his absence spring had graduated to […]
Brake Lights by Mike Ferguson
Driving into town today I saw three cars that were each missing a working brake light—a bulb burnt out that needed replacement—and though I didn’t have the opportunity or inclination to tell any of them about the loss which I could see but they could not, I did become concerned how there might be […]
Starlight in You by Daniel Lind
We relax on my balcony as the night sky sings. Scars are inscribed on your parchment arms, caned by your father. I don’t want you to go home, so I offer shelter. You shake your head. That will only make your burden heavier. Darkness consumes him each night, and you have to be there to […]
In the Backseat of the Limo by Mare Leonard
Dad’s in the middle, Mom on his right. I’m on his left. We follow the hearse filled with American Beauties, Baby’s Breath. A cascade of life. Dad in advanced Alzheimer’s sees the roses and asks, “Who died?” “Caroline died.” The beautiful charming, smart girl, your first child who could ride the waves, sweep the ball […]
the middle of classes by Keith Nunes
he’s running wildly among the weeding grasses of the frontal lobe, one minute perched on the Jericho wall then tumbling in a roll to the pins of bowling ball alleys lining the middle of classes, this heavily forested man with his singular language is dragging lone-wolf sorrows in a birthing sack, he howls over his […]
The Family Myths by Nicholas Cook
My name is Hyacinth. It’s the name Mom gave me because I was born the color of spring flowers, wrapped in my fleshy cord. A nurse breathed life into me. Babies are supposed to be born pink, Mom said, born crying. I was as quiet as a bouquet. * The first boy I kiss does […]
Truth is by Karen Neuberg
I lied about what I wanted. Instead I wrote a thank you note for what I got. When I tricked myself once too often, I tripped myself. And on up the stairs. To see the stars. There he kissed me. That was not a lie. Or not a lie I knew as a lie. This […]
Smoking on the Back Steps of Bobst Library, NYU by Melissa Goode
It is eight PM, half way through our shift. The air is warm. Your knee is two inches from mine. I smell the cleanness of your T-shirt, your skin heating the white cotton. You flick ash from a cigarette with a neat flip of your wrist and offer me your Coke. I sip from the […]
Drowning Symphonies by Ashley Mares
This is the home we built: the one we placed on the wings of butterflies so tenderly it collapsed into their veins—the red, bloodied hope and blue from their eyes: my dreams the doorway we’d walk through. In this place, there are ravens in the walls: shadows hang from the chandelier. In this place we […]
Munch IV by Kyle Hemmings
The enemy has devised a new way to rout us: They’re setting our clocks back by means of invisible hands and remote frequencies. This means we can never be 100% sure who we were before or then. Like the enemy we try committing inflicting domestic atrocities—hacking each other’s sex lives but only coming away dry […]
Whores Are Always Melancholy by Jess Mize Review by Lydia Havens
In Whores are Always Melancholy, by Jess Mize, published by Finishing Line Press, what starts off as a narrative with a haunting, gritty film-noir feel soon becomes something more contemporary and sinister. The book begins with descriptions from a ghost-like narrator, who travels around the world and describes everything they see. They allude to jazz […]
The Speaker Can’t Be in the Poem Today by Spencer Silverthorne
I am on the verge of watching a terrific blockbuster. Direct your attention to the window. To some sinister expression of light. To lyric exposing the wild interiors of the insipid. Bark stripped from trunk, cast your eyes on the tender bleakness, insufficient thing-hood. You had me when you said I was prone to invasion. […]
Petty Theft by William Doreski
Writing with a pen stolen from the elegant shop in the mall, I feel tough as Pancho Villa. As the day thickens with impasto I compose unlikely rhetoric to peddle to whichever demagogue outbids the others. Meanwhile wine and cheese shops fatten for the holidays. Celebrities divorce and sue each other while draped in the […]
The Detective’s Chair (6) by Anne M. Carson
Comrade Chief Inspector Chen Cao Shanghai Police, China Comrade Chen is permeable to poetry. Ineffable feelings assail him—the waft, the glimpse—how poems unfold is how crimes. Self-professed romantic, he wishes poetic justice upon crimes. 1990s; Shanghai teeters between an open door and fear of the bourgeois West. Lit major, published modernist poet, Chen is yanked […]
Enigma Machine by Richard J. Fleming
1 During a full body scan, I am entering a phase of life where I no longer feel connected. At the bottom of the landfill, there are broken medicine bottles. I try to put together the pieces. There are traces of finger paint on the shards. My hard wired brain can’t process scrambled egg images […]
How to Breathe by Jack Garrett
Her trachea: that had been sliced. As the skin of her neck was drawn tight by shaky fingers, the gristly tube was sectioned by a penknife blade, and a plastic one, ripped viciously from her little boy’s science project The Purification of Water in the back seat, was poked in, blood sucked out through grimacing […]
A Simple Postscript by C.C. Russell
The guilt that underlies that story is, of course, a different narrative than the one that you would allow to creep into the writing. The guilt that underlies that story has eaten at you for years, decades now. The guilt that underlies the story is the reason that you are writing this postscript in the […]
I am lying on the floor by Liz Howard
I am lying on the floor & you are standing over me & you are saying things & you are saying things at me & you are yelling & I cannot hear what you are yelling & you are reinforcing your abuse with your behavior & you are denying your abuse while reinforcing your abuse […]
Relationship Status, Tenth Month by Matthew Smart
During sex neither of them said much. But afterwards she would sometimes talk in strange nonsense strings of words, random and unrelated. If it was good she could go on for a long time, her eyes closed, her mouth rambling and running through a litany of nonsense. The first time it happened he thought that […]
Rhythm as Wisdom by Michael T. Young
This is not a way of time but of timing. It starts before the morning alarm, maybe in dream, maybe in pulses of the brain figuring a way to raise you from the burial of sleep and its nocturnal conjurings: fluttering eyelids and a memory of mother lifting you from the sea. But there it […]
Contrapuntal by J.A. Pak
Playing Mozart’s sonata in F major & find myself at the third movement, which is a movement I’ve never liked and rarely play. I rarely play an entire sonata & in a mood of F major, I decided I must finish the sonata. It’s as I’d expected, and why I play it slowly [in a […]
Walker Evans Saves The Bridge by Benjamin Goluboff
Their fathers had been, if not friends, associates in the elaborate network of capitalist exchange whose ramifications seemed to extend to the very boundaries of the Columbus Heights neighborhood where the two young men, along with certain kindred spirits, had established a kind of demi-monde. And so it was only natural, when brought together by […]
Let Down Your Hair by Carla Kirchner
Weigh my hair—three quarters of a pound dry, one and 1/4 pound wet. Add two-pounds of large pizza plus the cardboard, peppers, extra cheese. Count the damp air burdening the trees, the strange light from the street lamps, the neighbors prying eyes as my braid coils down to the waiting delivery driver. Figure in the […]
Story Time at The Rip Tide Inn by Ron Gibson, Jr.
Outside the little motel beach house, winter storms bomb the shoreline, gulls pivot and churn, waves drive into the sand like slow fists, while inside molten bodies crash and cool, twined under twisted covers, forming new land. Spellman’s arm is a peninsula; his hand, an isthmus; his fingers, explorers. Linnea fills his touch with soft […]
The Only Tear in Detroit by Lyndi Bell O’Laughlin
It’s a riot in there, the mind incarcerating itself with yarns, vivid festivals of nothing. It’s hard to resist the urge to fling a little chum in the water, a risky thought, say, or an unchained memory. Stand back and watch as pictures and words roil and foam, listen as they whisper to each other […]
Postcard to John, Overlooking Barachois Beach, Late May by Steve Bellin-Oka
A little after dawn and no one else is here. The sky’s an envelope lightning scribbles on with disappearing ink. Illegible handwriting, a jagged cursive S on opaque nimbus clouds. Everything here will be gone once the tide goes back out—minnow pools in the red clay sand, crab husks, live clam maws scattered like discarded […]
Little Joe Gould #5 by Devon Balwit
he was a bum, but he spoke the language of seagulls. when he flapped his arms and gave their lost-child shriek, your beer foam turned to surf and ebbed and flowed in your glass. he would cadge a cigarette, puffing with one hand, the other still a wing, rising and falling in the wind of […]
Fabric by Carol Ellis
The shirt on the floor crumpled into a human face is nothing more than what I dropped after pulling it over my head. Pulled off in the final jerk of fabric my face lies crumpled in all that it has seen I walk away from my face the resemblance I imagine and the presence of […]
Star Fall Sans Sound by Jess Mize
sixty to seventy degrees (the blissful climate perpetuated in the city of angels) only the hint of a breeze; atavistic autumnal scent provoking awe at all the southern falls past and the warm silence of nature with some leaves ruby grapefruit red and others neon lemon butterfly with a few still as green as the […]
Harvest by Ken Poyner
Six soldiers sit with their backs to the moon, looking like six chicken legs set out for this Sunday’s afternoon family reunion dinner. Six legs from chickens raised on this very farm; chickens that came when rhythmically called; chickens that received feed from the upturned, folded apron of the plaid family matriarch. Chickens that pulled […]
Lumique by Matt Alexander
I. I emplain to the oche oche oche. In the white violet night I recite the sephel-oh sephel-ay sephelee-lee, at least till the sun corylizes. I crimp a circuit for tom borrow. At last, as the final crepuscles give way to their shinder corpuscles, I perform the diminuendo of brooboo-lit day. It is the least […]
The Prose Poem by Ethan Phibbs
This blue midnight stirs with a myriad of eyes: those islands I know not even the names of; unidentified vegetation, enigmatic wildlife, unpredictable weathers. I swear I saw a bird nest perched on the revolving head of an owl inquisitive of identity. Impending clouds collapse like an airy ocean covering the streets in a gray-blue […]