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Cliff Saunders
Dancing across the desert with a slender ballerina, I hear a voice whisper sister. The ballerina slips from my embrace and vanishes into a mirror half-buried in sand and cactus flowers. I try to follow, breaking the mirror with my first step. Its glass bleeds like skin. Brother. I hold my breath. Wind blows a…
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Bill Garvey
Toolsheds for Ted & Shelly My neighbor across the cove hauls gravel in a wheelbarrow from the mound at the end of his driveway to the section of lawn where the new toolshed will be built to replace the old. The cove is wide enough that I can’t see the gravel or the wheelbarrow, but…
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Leah Mueller
Conflagration It burns away eventually— projects we spend our lifetimes building, downtown edifices that once stood vigilant for patrons, their heavy doors flung open for the last time, then closed again. Inferno erupts through rooftops, long past midnight, when shopkeepers forget to pay attention. Too late now. Down the block, another structure scorched beyond recognition.…
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Kevin Henry
It started as rioting. And right from the beginning you knew this was real. . . because it wasn’t on the TV any more. It was in the street outside. It was coming through your windows. It was a virus, an infection. You didn’t need a doctor to tell you that. It was the blood.…
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LeeAnn Pickrell
… there are, on this planet alone, something like two million naturally occurring sweet things … Ross Gay, “Sorrow Is Not My Name” Sometime during our year of lockdown I stopped dancing, those graceful graceless steps across the living room at night on fuzzy slippered toes for an audience of one until the world had…