Ursa Major
What is now known by the sorrel and the roan?By the chestnut, and the bay, and the gelding grey?It is: Stay by the gate you are given.Remain in your place, for your season.O had the overfed dead but listenedTo that high-fence, horse-sense, wisdom...But,“Did you hear...
The Social Virtues Series
Recent Posts
Live like the Skeleton: A Review of The Fire Eater by Jose Hernandez Diaz
Jose Hernandez Diaz’s debut chapbook The Fire Eater (Texas Review Press, 2020) is a subtle and endearing surrealist love letter to the life of the...
When Tulsa Nearly Killed Queen
Like guests sitting next to a wedding reception’s DJ booth, I couldn’t make out hardly anything Patsy was saying
Four Poems
tight embrace as if you’d break on letting go. I saw the sky for what it was: immaculate field, burial ground. A voice cried out from across the lake: “Abelard! Heloise!”—your uncle Fulbert calling us to return “right now!” A thousand minnows circled our legs like shiny badges. I couldn’t speak as I gazed at you too deep in bliss to utter a word, too damn ecstatic. We swam ashore and dressed in vain.
Emoticonfiscated
It was me on Cookman Ave. that night/the newscaster was in the news/for what apparently everyone had always known
Confession
I did not consider the fact/That for the rest of your life you would only get older/If I’d been thinking, I would have held in my hand
Three Poems
In darkness / empirical evidence underhand / a fingertip rubs black / but not ink.
Three Poems
I’ve hung my light blue/evening gown on the bedroom/door so that at night,/when I turn away from you to sleep,/I still have something to look at—
The Luminous World of Maurya Simon
Maurya Simon’s The Wilderness: New and Selected Poems 1980-2016 (Red Hen Press 2018, 218 pages) represents a life of questioning and perception, whether the scene is a backyard or a street in Bangalore or the ekphrastic poems of The Weavers or reflections on sinners and saints.
A Review of PRAYING NAKED by Katie Condon
“Here I am/in a century that has its eyes/shut tight,” writes Katie Condon in “Origin,” the first poem in her debut collection Praying Naked (Mad Creek Books 2020). Like so many of the poems, “Origin” moves fluidly between an I and an us, between the natural world and the one created by human beings.
Three Poems
what if i kill the stars first when a medical document asks my marital status i write, trying not to get my hopes up about sunlight that’s what it feels like even in the fuck me state some bleach-white beach in florida where i lived on bourbon with a co-conspirator...
Two Poems
It’s big enough already, longing distance, like the mind body problem, and like the mind-body problem, the stuff of mind and the stuff we mine is simply information, neither matter nor energy, the mind being software to the brain’s hardware.