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Richard Jordan
On Mother’s Day It’s been nearly fifty years but standing at the grassy shore of Clarkson Pond as sun sets fuchsia above still-budding maples, I can hear you calling whip-poor-will over and over. It was our ritual, though there was never a response. I don’t think you expected one. Those birds from your childhood became…
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Peter Mladinic
The way you take the side of a lead pencil and shade something in is the way the river came at me, whether looking out second floor glass or standing on a bank, the river shape was part curve, part zigzag, as a hand with a pencil-on-paper horizontal. By contrast, the human-made cascade, shelved, tiered…
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Christine Potter
Eighty-four degrees, Late April It’s weird as Halloween: storm-dirty clouds that haven’t thundered yet, sun boring through like an ember landing on something you wouldn’t think flammable. Humid air you’d shrug at in July, but exotic now. And so I‘m remembering my mother’s mother and her thick, black hair—not a strand of it silver or…
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Susan R. Morritt
Windsor Raceway, 1973 Cinnamon sprinkled, red and brown right down to the stubble, right down to the nicotine-stained fingers, retrieving the butt from between those lips, square cowboy teeth. “Get off my foot, you little shit.” Nonchalant, so Marlon Brando, James Dean. A rebel with a torn running shoe, and a skinny girl with glasses…
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Thomas Molitor
The Last Wasp You crawl across the unsealed cells of a hexagonal hive that’s mounted in the corner beneath the roof like an outdoor speaker. You move your smooth, sleek, shiny tripartite body from chamber to chamber conducting a final crib check in a collapsing colony. This is your last crawl. Do you know that?…