O misshapen pearls, O pebbles from the human brook, I summon the rusty taste of you, the pleasure of twisting. You were the first lesson in how nothing lasts, but no one paid attention. Pillow by pillow, we gathered your coins. Whatever we purchased is also gone. Charles Rafferty‘s most recent collection of poems is […]
Author Archives: Dale
it is not safe for a woman by Quinn Rennerfeldt
of her age / to appear alone / in public / in the evening / to be nude / in this location / to make eye contact / with a stranger / on a well-lit road / after 8 pm / to be sick / in her generation or / to be outside of the […]
Getting the Message by Larry Smith
I find Chinese writing on the bathroom mirror, a large scroll of a dozen characters. I don’t write or read Chinese, and no one has been here in days. So much of life a mystery, and we the Emperor without clothes. I take the mirror’s photo and text it to Mei, my Chinese friend who […]
On the Edge of Chinatown by Tara Deal
A bit of scaffolding falls off some pink building. A tangerine bag blows up. The report says gusts are going to get worse. A painter at the intersection takes his easel and watercolors inside: ochre, fuchsia, mint green, maybe. I can’t see everything. Someone pulls fake frogs from the pond, that is, pool. One crane […]
Mischief by C G Holder
He is a provocateur; a sly, appraising glance begins the game. He will proposition your wife or goad you to fury with arguments he doesn’t believe. There is no philosophy guiding the provocation; no pricking of pretensions. The aim is simply to kick up hot sparks, to watch them flare and sting in the darkness, […]
⟷ by Mathew Weitman
Once I traveled as rain. It is a sensation that is not easy to describe—but one that is not dissimilar to standing in the center of a two-dimensional depiction of a cube, and facing the implication of a vertex. I found comfort in snow-melt. Sometimes, I’d slide down windowpanes, as discretely as I could—but always, […]
The Art of Prose (With Digressions) by Daniel Nester
Today is the day Melville was describing: rainy, and dark, the end of summer. He would have liked doom metal and free jazz, or said he liked it to friends. All the rebel artists were rich children artists once. They saw close up what these powerful shitcans can do. We are not in the wrong […]
Upper Bunk by Biman Roy
The girl is asleep. Almost diagonally and high up from where I am sitting. Her long legs slightly out of the edge of the bunk. Her body rocks a little as the carriage moves. Outside, the vast body of land, water, and plantations whiz past backwards. Not too many people are around. Some are reading, […]
The Speed of Things by Lisa Dart
That things are so fast now, we find it hard to take them in, though I’m not only talking broadband, breaking news, new builds. Nor any picture, time or space brought to screen on your slick smartphone at running pace. I mean dreams. That come from nowhere like the swans we saw driving back last […]
A Poem about a Poem by Evan Cozad
I’m writing a poem about a poem who wants to be a better dad than his dad was. So, he hops aboard a bus that’s traveling to a Buddhist temple in Indianapolis. There he hopes to find someone to rid him of the demons his father left him. On the bus, the other passengers make […]
True North by F.J. Bergmann
The cup rides in a basket, adrift on the gleaming table. The basket is boat-shaped, with no handle, and no oars by means of which the cup could row to a safe haven, although the basket is safety of a sort, preventing the cup from being easily knocked over and broken. The cup is the […]
Winter Thoughts by Tim Hawkins
Others no longer present have traced fitting inscriptions into the steam of the window and the dust of the bureau: Flat Affect; Bent, Not Broken; White Knuckling It; The Starving Time; A God-Awful Thing to Behold. They could attest to a flash frozen landscape out there—all cold casks of herring in an ice-covered brine. Outside […]
Mandy by Sandy Olson-Hill
It is explained to me there will be six students to participate. Mandy is either new or returned, a lot of the students are. Anagrams and labels abound. ADD and OCD. Cognitive disabilities, Tourettes or on the autism spectrum, like my grandson. Like me. We will be studying art today. Making fun in the academic […]
Daft by Grace Marie Grafton
She believes in prayer. Or, not exactly believes, but prays anyway, daily. Says, “Please spare me ever having to paint my toenails chartreuse or shave my head.” Touches her gold ring (daily), picturing increase not exactly in the form of gold coins but maybe a bank error in her favor. Holds up her arthritic thumb […]
What Time the Clock Won’t Say by Meeah Williams
It’s that rarefied hour of morning when you can hear glass breaking. No one will fully waken to your touch and you can almost see what cats see. The hallway is wired, tense with the potential explosives have. It’s like you’re the only one left alive. You must walk carefully to the kitchen, every hair […]
< > by Mathew Weitman
There are two distinct shapes created by a skein of migratory geese. The first shape is created in the blue it moves towards: it is too big to see the beginning of, but the V of birds forms its end. The second shape is created by all the sky the geese are leaving: it begins […]
Flower-Girls by Rachel Pietrewicz
My sister once told me if you swallow a cherry pit, a tree will grow in your stomach. She said it happens all the time to girls who are too fast and too hungry to stop the pits from sliding over their tongues and down their throats. My sister said sometimes the girls wouldn’t even […]
Back to the Future Haibun by Jennifer Jean
My twelve-year-old taps a sneaker on every tile zigging through the cloistered Monk Gardens at the Gardener palace museum. Worship the dust next time! she says. There is no dust in there, I say, missing my Degas, my Titian, my Singer. My girl slows, puts a finger on a peeling, russet branch—says, This tree reminds […]
Where Love Brought Me by William Braun
To waiting rooms with no windows and chipped tiles, walls with smudge marks like erasers and gashes I could have patched and painted in the time we spent there. To a bed with a rail you erected but couldn’t collapse. Portraits of flowers behind plexiglass cages, a television locked in a case. To the safe […]
Untraveling Haibun by Daryl Scroggins
Bridge words: furthermore…moreover…finally…. Twenty people crossing one bridge, or twenty bridges crossed by one person, as Wallace Stevens has it. At stream’s edge in the park I see part of a late evening sky as if through a stranger’s eye, the sun down behind hills, clouds, just bereft of color, now ash. I imagine it’s […]
The Invasion by Mark Seidl
Our alien abductors took us far from where we’d been, to red mountains, gulches of spiny brush, sun like a ladle crashing on a brass plate. The aliens had no eyes, nothing we could recognize as ocular organs, so eye-contact was out as a way to establish our intentions. We wanted to step into some […]
Bird Dream by Angela Buck
I cannot say for sure what happened. The bird came through the window, and you caught it with both hands, but not before dropping a wink to every man in the room. And the window doesn’t matter much, except that it may be the only thing that saw the scene exactly, which is to say […]
The Last Public Beheading by Mark Seidl
The officer stood next to the device, his task that day to tip the headless body into the pine box. His superiors thought he was ready for this responsibility: he’d done well during previous executions, helping serenely to carry the closed box to the unmarked grave. But when the blade hit and the body of […]
My Tarantula, My Therapist by Tanja Bartel
My sleep-gauzed eyes do not at first see the tarantula on my nightstand. The only place, mother said, she could fit the aquarium. She knows my terror, but with the foster kids, it’s a crowded house. Spiders are all about vibration, so she senses my movements like no one else. When I come home from […]
Gait by Biman Roy
after Danielle Mitchell Sometimes it’s hard to find your gait. Even if you know it, you can’t place a finger on it. Is it straight or crooked, halting or free-flowing, plantar or astral? You are not sure. Sometimes it’s like knowing another body, naked and close, fold by fold, breath by breath, like surveying a […]
Ralph & Alice by Kyle Hemmings
They always did things together. Like fly fishing and trying to conceive. When that failed, they bought a pet. In late middle age, they even stroked out at the same time. Their precocious monkey, Mr. Hobbs, dialed 911. Out of rehab, Alice walked with a tilt, became obsessed with Ralph’s old fish hooks, a tinderbox […]
The Brief Story of Sunday by Daniel Lev Shkolnik
Red saw a different girl each day of the week. Murder brewed between them all. He would take them back into his room and screw the black bulb into the lamp. They opened their chests and let him eat—flinching without a sound. A new Day came along who thought, like all the others, she could […]
New Year Cliché’d by D.R. James
January 1, 2017 That kind of title for one, to mark this particular año nuevo like that for another, to be going on in this vein yet another. Too metta? Meh: it’s all contradictory cringing: ashes outing a vicious victory: archetypal exile among the flood of smudged hours: barbarity, barrels of it: unity like underwater […]
Absences by Stella Pierides
The ossuary, a white-washed, rectangular building, is dark and cool. A musty smell envelops me as I enter. I am searching for the metal box containing my mother’s bones. I’ve been told she is confined to one on the shelves that run the length of the room. I start searching methodically. Each box has a […]
The Unexpected Visitor by David James
You’ll never guess who came over. I didn’t believe it. Not one person I’ve asked, and I’ve asked hundreds, could guess who came by my house today. In a way, it’s a miracle he came by. There, I gave you a clue: it’s a he. It’s something I’ve always dreamed about and wished for, but […]
An Illustrated Book of Neglected Nostalgia by Richard J. Fleming
Back to the basics had a certain derogatory appeal. I wanted it certified in wallpaper paste, spelled out on a duotone horizon of a penny postcard. But the Boss had a problem with your application. You didn’t use authentic, black India ink; and it ran across the page like a bandwidth across the curve of […]
The Lost Boys by Diane Henningfeld
November, and there they are, on the front page of the Daily Telegram, the three boys whose father didn’t bring them home for Thanksgiving. The newspaper ages their pictures each year and sometimes it feels like the boys are children of far away friends who send us photos each Christmas. We watch the boys grow, […]
The Design of Bridges by Christine Taylor
I’m driving on a narrow winding bridge impossibly suspended over the ocean. The car is too wide for the lane, the door scrapes the concrete crash barrier when I move to make room for oncoming traffic. Sparks fly. Soon it’s just me on the road, tumbling uphill. It’s like being strapped in a roller coaster, […]