Mud and Honey
Beyond the six windows of our little world is a sea that rises with wind and temper. Nothing is even anymore, the horizon an old lunatic, bashing its head against a tilted sky. White caps form on the backs of swells, the Aleutian volcanoes sleeping behind spitting rain and haze. It’s early season in Bristol Bay, where I work as a deckhand on a commercial fishing vessel for the summer, catching sockeye salmon on the eastern edge of the Bering Sea.
The Social Virtues Series
Recent Posts
Heartbreak, Uncertainty, and Healing
These Few Seeds by Meghan SterlingTerrapin Books, 2021. “Maybe in death we become a collage / of what we have most longed for— / finally you are...
Three Poems
On Kansas 156 All the radio has to sayis eighties rock and Kenny Rogers.You get behind a horse trailerand stay there because you can’t seearound it...
Blue Magic
(at Silver Lake, St. Anthony, Minnesota) If I stare long enough...
Thirst
SHANTAY UNLOCKED THE FRONT DOOR OF HER MOTHER’S HOUSE, THE WEIGHT of her 9mm Luger pressed against her hip. Before she pushed the door open, she glanced over her shoulder, scanning the block, which was moonlit and chilly on that spring night. Inside, she untied her...
Self-Portrait at Sixty-Three
The keyboard sounds like a mouse’s /
footsteps when he taps, middle finger /
of his right hand bent, unable to touch /
flesh against palm. Walking to relieve
On Cooking: A Golden Shovel
My grandma and I spend the morning cleaning collard greens. We /
pick the leaves from their stems, turning them over for bugs and soil. Real
Fern King
ACCORDING to Wikihow.com, the proper way to launder a cashmere sweater is hand wash with mild soap, then lay flat on a clean towel. This is more or less what Jane said last night, now confirmed by an independent third party. Can’t she be righteously, indignantly wrong for once? I want to live in a world where my girlfriend bungles the essential facts about an important laundry controversy, and then I go down on her and we watch Hulu and never fight ever. Is that too much to ask?
The Ghost We Call Meaning: A Review of Vijay Seshadri’s That Was Now, This Is Then
That Was Now, This Is Then Vijay Sheshadri Graywolf, 2020. “We are obsessed with ourselves,” wrote theoretical physicist, Carlo Rovelli in his book, Reality Is Not What It Seems. “We study our history, our psychology, our gods. Much of our knowledge revolves around...
This was Then, That was Now: An Interview with poet Vijay Seshadri
As editor of Green Mountains Review, I would like to extend deep gratitude to Vijay Seshadri for speaking with us about his new book This Was Now, That Was Then (Graywolf, 2020). Seshadri won the Pulitzer Prize for his collection 3 Sections in 2014. Currently, he is Poetry Editor at The Paris Review and teaches at Sarah Lawrence College. He is also the editor of The Essential T.S. Eliot.
— E. Powell, May 13, 2021
A Review of Mark Wunderlich’s GOD OF NOTHINGNESS
The experience of reading Mark Wunderlich’s fourth poetry book, God of Nothingness, mirrors the page-turning necessity and immediacy of a can’t-put-it-down novel: We must learn what happens next.
The Mother Who Says Yes to the Sword
O has-been mother of the free-flowing booze
& handy diet pills,
You cashed me in—a cool sacrifice: to jump-
Start your floundering career,