Emily De Ferrari: On Killing Flies with Dr. Seuss
I killed them in the window. I killed them on the door. And when I killed a hundred flies I kept on killing more. Why is my heart so cruel, … Continue reading
Riad Saleh Hussein: A Serene Evening
This evening is serene, This evening is not calm. I am a man or a pack of dynamite— Under my trench a red goose or a black unicorn. The woman … Continue reading
Robert Okaji: Aleppo
A father sings to his son, dead two days, and the platitudes persist. Widow of night. Lantern’s trick. What trace, you wonder, exists of humanity in these etched walls? Light … Continue reading
Majid Naficy: Calabrian Fig
Every morning when I go stair climbing I see her with a rake in hand Standing by a fig tree In front of her Roman house With arches and domes. … Continue reading
Al Maginnes: The Book of Forgetting
By now she’s tired of stories spotlighting her early deeds, actions too endearing to be plotted, or the years before she came, blanks of time distant as fires in the … Continue reading
Kate Daniels: Relapse
Several of the young men from the treatment center are already dead. They spanned the demographic spectrum so no conclusions can be made about why they did, or didn’t, make it. … Continue reading
David Huddle: Even Then I knew
for Lisa Fay Coutley Our mother was often desperate because of my brothers and me—once she threw the dish drainer at Charles, slapped the back of Bill’s head so that … Continue reading
Louise Bogan: Words for Departure
Nothing was remembered, nothing forgotten. When we awoke, wagons were passing on the warm summer pavements, The window-sills were wet from rain in the night, Birds scattered and settled over … Continue reading
Walter Bargen: Dogs of Beauty
Somewhere in some other place their kind are wild, meant for the verdant and exotic, and on the west slopes of the coastal range, near Palos Verdes, where the foothills … Continue reading
Susan Sonde: A Dagger of Sunlight Lies across His Bed
The room is quiet but for the rustle of the blanket under which he’d slept burrowed deep in the nest sense, that wholesome dark down there, where he lay on a … Continue reading
Jay Carson: Baroque
I remember the hollow cross above my mother’s bed And the day it opened to me accidentally. Me, playing, although perhaps always snooping. The back slid off like a caster … Continue reading
Elizabeth Romero: Face in the Mirror
I have nothing to give you. Nothing is so marked that it cannot cheat you By its own nature and pass through your hands Like fairy money. I stand … Continue reading
Michael Simms: The Garden and the Drone
We come to the garden because it is beautiful. Arborvitae, hydrangea, anemone— Even the names are beautiful. The men who call themselves our leaders Seem far away. We feel … Continue reading
Audio: ‘Fern Hill’ read by Dylan Thomas
. From a Caedmon recording: Dylan Thomas reads Fern Hill, his poem of a green and golden childhood. Email subscribers may click on the title of this post to listen … Continue reading
