Jennifer Bullis Our Lady of Lost Items Lady, where did you go, wherever were you, ever? I’m losing things in twos: two pairs of things, and twice now, you. Yesterday I hid my hiking poles behind a wide fir…
Jennifer Davis Michael Every Green and Growing Thing for my father I walk these woods and know that all around, unseen, in rotted stumps and fallen trees, is more life than I can imagine. I know because you taught me…
Malaika King Albrecht Accidental Saints It’s true I can find water with a simple bendy straw, but now with an exhale wedged in my lungs, I can’t breathe for a night or maybe it’s been three. The trap the…
Annie K Ivy Symbolizes Eternity On a walk to the small local grocery store, I found a bee dying on the sidewalk You told me to leave it—the cement was hot—running up the soles of my shoe into my…
Joshua Adam Walker What the Water Knows The river does not speak of bones, nor whisper all the names it keeps. It hums in tongues the current owns, a language swallowed by the deep. The water knows the ones…
Michael Boissevain Illumination “I am not empty, I am open.” --Vermeer, Tomas Transtromer After the stroke, after the aphasia, after the work of healing others, with one hand Tomas plays Haydn, moving deeper into pure music, where sound becomes…
Ingrid Wendt On the Nature of Butting Heads What could be sweeter than breakfast on the palm-fringed veranda, so you set down your bowl of jungle fruit and dart inside for coffee. And shit, if the Long- Tailed Grackle hasn’t…
Steven G. Kellman Talking to the Dead In Memoriam Wendy Barker Can we talk to the dead? Of course. But they never answer. A passion for language and each other brought the poet Wendy Barker and me together and kept…
Tracy Rundstrom Tracing Life Lines and Mending Heart Strings The sounds of the kitchen wake me up. Water running. Dishes being put away. Or maybe a knife being pulled out. I tense up, terrified she is following through with the…
Annee Lyons On the Fallen Caryatid CARYATID (n.) – a female figure serving as a column, bearing weight where a pillar might stand. Rodin’s fallen caryatid is still holding her stone. She’s crumpled beneath it, but she hasn’t let…