There’s a certain quality to the air in that memory, a certain way the cigarette smells. It has been a decade since you last smoked, but the sour taste is still there in that breeze, still a hard swallow and burn at your first gulp of smoke. First cigarette in a graveyard. It’s funny in […]
Tag Archives: C.C. Russell
The light/ Air by C.C. Russell
Arid end. The skies are what the ground wants to be. I remembered rain, your hair in that deluge. A cattle guard at the end of a dirt road. The clear air that we waited for. Hard ground and this place. Wyoming sky, a dust devil grows in the sunlight and spins itself out. This […]
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 […]
By the Third Week Two Prose Poems by C.C. Russell
By the Third Week Coating darkness. Snowflakes corkscrew through the branches of barren trees. Breath nearly the only thing visible before our faces. James was the first of us to go, but none of us had quite been able to see what it was that had dragged him away. Only the tracks of his heels—twin […]
Chloe – April, While the Traffic Passes by C.C. Russell
You’re blowing on the dandelions, puffing their soft seeds into the air through the neighborhood and watching them careen around the houses in the spring breeze. The cars drive by with their windows open, spewing sound. You dance. You dance to their music. Your face cracks open from joy. There’s mercy and then there is […]
Autumn A Collection by C.C. Russell
Autumn The clouds moved stealthily across the flat surface of the sky, an invisible high-atmospheric current whisking them along while we, on our backs in the grass near the pond, were left untouched. The geese rattled their tongues in long ululations of grief at a disappearing season. You put your hand on mine for a […]
An Interview with C.C. Russell
It’s Friday, and that means a brand new author interview! Today’s guest: the awesome C.C. Russell, a poet we love here at Unbroken. We’ve been privelaged to publish C.C.’s work in five issues, with more coming in March. We nominated his Spun for Best of the Net, and David’s Film for The Pushcart Prize, and […]
Trip by C.C. Russell
Outside of us, there were visions—an orange sort of aura over the range. Third sunset since you last slept, your eyes a stranger to themselves. You threw your hands out in a wild sudden gesture, flapped them across the sky; encompassing. “This,” you said. “All of this.” And then you fell silent, the evident depth […]