Poetry
Rembrandt’s Light
Luke Johnson reads Rembrandt’s Light We’re crossing Depression Era bridges and she is becoming more beautiful, driving with both hands on the wheel as we head inland: away from saltwater eddies where every few months an empty row boat falls … Continue reading
Leaning Towards Manifesto
Audio recording of author reading “Leaning Towards Manifesto” Composting is next to godliness. – My father Take your own advice: if Orpheus is in it or vultures (the impulse there is the same: skull picked clean by pain, mutilated song, … Continue reading
The Evolution of Nightmare
. . . with her hair bound up, she unburdened herself of her worst fears, a wild litany of nightmare and lament . . . Heaven swallowed the smoke. – Beowulf, trans. Seamus Heaney In the dream, the linguist with … Continue reading
Where the sentence ends the sentiment burgeons
Years since the old woman’s grandson turned early to ash and years since she’s seen the young woman who was his lover but seeing her now extends her arms crying you look just the same as that first day coming … Continue reading
Standard Time
James Brasfield reads Standard TimeQuartered deadfall from the hills, oak cut to length, fresh still the smell of woodgrain, a cord to heft, to calibrate angle and curve, to fit, to balance high the stack in rootless equilibrium. As if … Continue reading
Thread
if my life is a thread being pulled by a needle . . . If the chimes of freedom flash like the flash that caught you half a mile from home last night, still circling the quarry, wondering suddenly where … Continue reading
Looking Back
That blessing of salt— chlorine and sodium ions bound like bodies in love. A desert I held in my hands. Once I sprinkled salt on a magpie’s tail to keep it from flying, but fooled by its mournful, mirrored, lake-lit … Continue reading
Margaret Miller in the Williamette Valley, Oregon, 1858
My husband said I was unsexing myself, and soon I’d have a voice hard as hailstones. Yet when did I ever fail to spread my skirt to curtain off a female and protect her modesty? He believed I shamed him … Continue reading
Neighbor Fox
Slick calling card on the walkway, not ropy with fur like coyote scat, but as if to say Don’t tread on me. Not halfway through February I’d seen the fox three times, first stalking a great blue heron that waded … Continue reading
Alien
Until he turned his yellow glare on me, the snowy owl was a two-foot clump of snow in the wind-chopped flow of sand and grasses beaten gold behind the dunes, then a white lump down off the taiga from Keewatin … Continue reading