In search of the right place she’d taken the local that makes its way through South Jersey towns, twenty or so passengers aboard in motley dress, all minding their different manners. A small train, just two cars, one class, carrying many classes, she mused, ever the anthropologist. And she thought of extravagance and self-denial, her …
Category Archives: Poetry
Charm School [poem] by Catherine Doty
Back when I thought any good kisser was a shaman, I needed a dog to center and to calm me—not some ukulele of a specimen stuffed in a dress, but a solid, bow-legged side-kick of mutt, one who could handle an open door and a pig ear and set a good example, one who never …
Radium Springs [poem] by Sheila Black
Dry draw where the water tastes of talc. He sets a trailer on a hill- side and tells her it should feel like home. He wants to raise horses—some picture of flying feet and manes whipping in desert wind. But really he is uncomfortable riding, really he leaves the stallion behind to dash against the …
Bone-house [poem] by Anne Kaier
Saint Jerome ponders near an ancient skull, polished like a vase. Something to symbolize mortality. Does he scrub his thumb across the jagged edges of the nose meditating on his likely death, or does he just pat the thing, admiring the way its curves complement a water jug? If death is your familiar, it may …
Poem for an Ex by Sheila Black
I resisted accusing you, because I was guilty, too—rewriting you to make you fit, and don’t we all play such tricks with the “story of our lives?” Yet unlike Muriel Spark, who once remarked no character of hers could so much cross a street without her willing it, you keep doing whatever you like. What …
Pantoum for Playing Outside His Margins [poem] by Catherine Carson
She wants him to be happy in his life, so she tells him he can go. She plays outside his margins, sleeps on his side of the bed. She tells him he can go, finding comfort in vodka and swimming pools. She sleeps on his side of the bed, stares at the middle of her …
Edge [poem] by Sheila Black
You get weary of the pod of stars, of the words for bruise that resemble flowers. This is a drier country. It holds what has been for years; I can see your fingerprints on the ghost town glass, blown thick from sand, some kind of ordinary miracle of heat; smeared with mud, the faces behind …
The Woods [poem] by Edward Palumbo
THE WOODS near me are thick with brush and shrubs and the dog gets in there sometimes when he escapes out the sliders and then it is a waiting game i stand outside the woods and stare at him he stands in the brier and stares at me and he always does it at the …
Operator [poem] by JD DeHart
My aunt Sheila was an operator In the old days when you picked up Said, Operator, and she would be There, passing out advice She would manually unplug a wire Then plug it in another location To establish connection There are stories of operators Listening in on the affairs of politicians JFK comes to mind …
EZ Bake [poem] by Catherine Doty
A pie the size of an eye patch, cakes like checkers: the EZ Bake oven starts you out so small what you make is a sniff and a bite and barely that. What drives it is a light bulb: a mere idea, but you want to bake, want to fist and wrestle dough and slather …
Nests [poem] by Laura Eppinger
Being from where we are being white trash river rat being mechanic’s hands basement second home and dregs at coffee pot bottom being fermented feast the links of meat on church basement long afternoon, or beer cans for home team home game means you never stray far, for long. Being grandmother’s fine china set, strong …
For the Swan at White Rock [poem] by Robin Turner
I visit you at sunset for weeks on end, memorize your slender neck, each movement— slow white grace on our mud-thick lake. Bright apparition from the root of dusk, you have seamed yourself to the liquid lining of my vision, dreamed your body into mine. There in the space between sleep and waking you float— …
Jill, July [poem] by Catherine Harnett
How should I feel riding in the front seat of Bo’s red truck, right next to him, Johnny Cash on the radio, watching how he puts his left arm out the window, redder and more freckled than the right one. I am only twelve, but I notice things like that, look at him when he …
Maria [poem] by Catherine Doty
She rises from a nap in the dark apartment. Rain quickens, the black glass gives her back herself, her emptiness filling the frame. She opens the window to cool her hands in the rain and the ghost of the headache that sent her to bed crooks a finger. The medicines she would be well without …
The Affair [poem] by Stephen Dunn
Just when it seemed his marriage had settled into sleepy comforts and an occasional boost from a blue pill, he learned what the luckiest of adulterers come to know: you don’t need some large dissatisfaction to motivate an affair, some overarching complaint. A door would open in a faraway city; inside, everything felt like its …
Why I Never Married [poem] by David Simpson
Of course, I meant to, having been raised to believe marriage was God’s plan for us, and I wanted to for all the guilt-free sex a man desires and I had to, if I wanted to be a real man and a good Christian but then I took Physics and found out that fission was …
A Toast to the Cook [poem] by Bernard Cooper
A long fragrant leash of steam tethers me to your figure stirring a pot at the stove. Herbs steep, earthy and engrossing as the dirt I dig in my dreams. A tracery of ancient spills rises from the carpet fiber: bland, innumerable crumbs of bread; a whiff of stale table wine, once so wet and …
Life Guard [poem] by David Simpson
My father coaxed me to lie face down on the lake’s cold surface across his forearms, reassuring me that I could take a deep breath, put my nose into the water, and he wouldn’t let me drown. Despite my protests, he shifted my buoyed weight to just his palms, then to one palm, then to …
Red Sky [poem] by J.C. Todd
The day opens its case. Spinnakers blaze and a dawn like this washes up on the shoal of remembered where he left me behind, that boy who left himself in jungle muck and shrapnel, bile at the root of tongue and phantoms burning below his hips. Like a dog star, the bay drags into its …
First Birth (After Sharon Olds) [poem] by Kelley White
They taught us little, and what they taught us I had not learned, so I just took it as it came: slippery, the naked body blue-grey, greased, slipping as I turned it in my hands, blood rushing dark and clotting at my feet, the twisted rope unearthly white and pulsing under that too-bright glare, little …
To Know It Again [poem] by Sara Michas-Martin
The mind has some idea of what to do because it’s always been invested in the enterprise of seeing, keeping track of how something feels and how it operates and if it’s been here before, certain about the death of many cells or the time in line at the bank you hugged the wrong mother. …
In Trutina Mentis [poem] by David Simpson
When have I heckled the world with weapons, whether with the shofar or powderhorn of words made of all that long-time-tamped-down misfit feeling of a man lost at his own party? I have, like Peter, preferred to chauffer moi-même near the flame of some stupid wish such as, some day, lying in the Queen of …
Where They Were Sent (1949) [poem] by J.C. Todd
Ice patching ditches and feed troughs shimmers, but there’s no shiny patch on the hut’s rusted roof. Fields that snow crusted a day ago are seized by frost, by frozen shit and barnyard clutter, the gardens iced-over, their crop cabbage stumps. These are the man-plowed fields of one-cow farms, holdings that yield enough to keep …
While Walking to the Beach the Crazy Dog Lady Meets a Pit Bull Named Betty Marion White…(poem) by Renée Ashley
One block from the ocean the dog lady catches an unwavering scent & sights the sweet decided switching of a young man bearded & shuttered behind dark glasses What he is hiding from Not his dog who’s hooked to a leash as thin as a filament of duck down The wind is a bitch & …