Jianqing Zheng: Dreaminations
[…] young woman with a basket in her hand walking down the road, her long skirt swaying like sunlight rustling with shriveled leaves. Is she taking lunch to her husband harvesting cotton or going berry picking in the woods?
Molly Fisk: Suffer No Fools
I woke in the dark
and watched light rise up
behind the trees, pale gray
to a backlit lemon yellow
turning gold and unlikely
blue, the colors blossoming
Sean Sexton: Not
Not the listless woods these days,
their ongoing summer song
same as the year-round sound in my head.
Robert Frost: A Servant to Servants
My father’s brother wasn’t right. They kept him
Locked up for years back there at the old farm.
I’ve been away once – yes, I’ve been away.
The State Asylum.
Sean Sexton: Planting Aeschynomene Seed
It pours from a muslin sack like sunlight
through a cracked window shade, fifty pounds
to a metal washtub, old as your footsteps.
Linda Blaskey: Two Poems
The air I take in feels thin, ragged, and rough against the walls of my lungs.
This neighbor to the south of us uses a .22 long rifle.
So does the neighbor to the north.
Dane Cervine: Holography
this is what Jeannie’s lover felt—the empty year
reeling out of orbit, no gravity, lost
in a centerless universe blown wide
Sean Sexton: Hold What You Got
Mayhem, butchery, and sheer witlessness
have grown acute with time and become the order of things.
Frogs creak in brief aubade
Video: Skin & Bone
A drifter begins suffering horrifying visions after taking a job on a secluded farm.
Naomi Shihab Nye: Little Farmer
how right he was about slowness,
the path of sunlight through leaves,
how dirt has always befriended me,
Video: Nancy Isenberg – White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America
Marginalized as a class, white trash have always been at or near the center of major political debates over the American identity.
Paul Christensen: The Cornhole Tournament
What happens when a large segment of a population finds itself displaced, bullied off the bench?
Sean Sexton: Hillside Equipment Auction Yard Outside Dothan, Alabama
I’m the wretch the song’s about
Gary Fincke: After War News
The moon, lately, was a celebrity, full
and a few miles closer than usual, enough
to bring three neighbors outside near midnight.
