Ritual
I turned to the breath-steamed window, parting a pane with my ungloved hand. There among the ornamental maples of the cemetery, I could just make out the wise men: bulb-lit, clustered, faces in prayerful repose. They appeared the day after Thanksgiving and stood through late January, long after we’d packed the plastic mistletoe in tissue, dragged molting trees to the curb. I never found out where the extension cords led.
The Social Distance Reading Series
Recent Posts
Review of The River Won’t Hold You by Karin Gottshall
David Weinstock (david.weinstock@gmail.com) lives in Middlebury, Vermont. His collection The Amalek Poems appeared in Truck.
Do Us Part
I’ve been wanting to ask you, Do you remember what I said at your wedding? Once you’d exchanged vows by banjo and your parents cried through their speeches; after Hava Nagila, when you and your bride flew on chairs.
Congratulations to GMR contributor Alison Prine!
Frequent GMR contributor Alison Prine has won the 2014 CPR Book Award for her manuscript Rearview Mirror.
Photons
Reeve is an artist. He’s sketching his wife Ellen, how she might look in thirty years. He is adding depth to her expression—her eyes pushed back by what she’s seen and felt, her bones more prominent.
Review of Original Bodies by Doug Ramspeck
Emily Borgmann is a poet and essayist, and facilitates writing workshops with youth in her community. She is an MFA candidate at the University of Nebraska, and the recipient of a Helen W. Kenefick prize from the Academy of American Poets. Emily’s poetry and nonfiction have appeared in Salamander, Skidrow Penthouse, and Alligator Juniper.
Road Crew
It was the summer after I quit minor-league ball. (“Quit” is a relative term. My arm was not up to the task.)
Reverse
J.G. MCCLURE is an MFA candidate at the University of California – Irvine, where he teaches writing and works on Faultline. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Gettysburg Review, Fourteen Hills, and The Southern Poetry Anthology. His essays and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in Green Mountains Review, Colorado Review, Cleaver, and Rain Taxi. He is the Craft Essay Editor and Assistant Poetry Editor of Cleaver, and is at work on his first collection.
In Handfuls
CYNTHIA ATKINS’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Alaska Quarterly Review, American Letters & Commentary, BigCityLit, BOMB, Caketrain,,Clementine, Del Sol Review, Denver Quarterly, Harpur Palate, Inertia, The Journal, North American Review, Sou’wester, Tampa Review, Valparaiso Review, and Verse Daily among others. Her second collection, “In The Event of Full Disclosure” was recently featured on the Huffington Post and the Bill and Dave Cocktail Hour, and reviewed in [PANK] and the North American Review. She earned her MFA from Columbia University’s School of the Arts and holds residencies from the VCCA and Breadloaf Writer’s Conference and currently is currently the new associate poetry editor of MadHat Lit, and an assistant professor of English at Virginia Western Community College. She lives in Rockbridge County, VA on the Maury River with her family.