Stuck to the Safety
Your father is lying on the couch under a quilt with an Apsáalooke print on it. He tells you, I’m sorry I can’t go, this thing is killing me. And you nod your head that folds your high-necked sweater down because it is old and has been worn and washed time and again. You are hot, standing there in your sweater and your jacket and your bright vest with your wool hat and two layers of pants. He tells you, You’ll be fine but stay off the reservation. He tells you he’s expecting big things from you—that you will feed the family over the winter after today.
Recent Posts
The Serpent of Eighth Hole
When I came home from summer camp in the Poconos in 1958, Knutt showed me a pair of turtles he’d caught in Queen Anne Creek. Silver-dollar-size painted terrapins basked on sunlit mats of watercress that grew against Queen Anne’s banks like barrier reefs beside the deeper, more quickly flowing clear-water channel midstream.
A Review of Jen Karetnick’s THE CROSSING OVER
A Review of Jen Karetnick’s THE CROSSING OVER
Still Life
A shoe stands / at the forest edge, / tongue depressed / with spectacles / and one gray sock.
The Knock-Knock Bardo & The Beyond
While I travel the world’s / geography, history, / and virtual present, / in mind and poetry—
June Pruning
My husband stands under the lilac, clippers in hand, / squints up at bare twigs / among the heavy, spent blossoms.
Lake Monsters
We make the best of what we’ve got. Two tents, a flat piece of land, a nylon hammock that packs down to nearly nothing. We stuff the cooler with ice, but the week-long heat wave stretching across Vermont means we’re careful about opening it too often. One too many times, you say, and everything will go bad. The eggs will hard-boil in their carton, the fat on the bacon will start to crisp.
Poetic Magic: A Modern Metaphysical
By the time I finished Dan Lewis’s collection Intimations of the Focal Plane many sections of my journal were scribbled over with citations of snippets from the tome. His words, blazed and blazoned on my pages, had magically transformed each into a focal plane of its own.
Two Poems
Side effects may include digging / a hole in your personal snow / to a time before your heart / floated next to your father’s heart
Two Poems
Lashed & anchored to the front of each ship, / a woman—breasts carved from dark oak, / all the wildness sanded down, polished out; / half human, half fish, a grotesque fantasy
Incarnate
Two wolves mating and then / at rest, the carnal moment just caught.
Snakes
In Ghana, I was warned, all snakes are poisonous. All ninety-two species. If you are bitten, you have to grab the snake and take it along to the hospital so they can give you the correct antivenin. Assuming they have antivenin. And assuming there’s a hospital.
Want to Submit Your Work?