Everything in Salt Water
Baptized at ten given too soon a clean heart a shiny new spirit so much left of me to make filthy. When I turned teenager my mother tells me to wash it well not to walk around in the world humming. Tells me drink it girl, it tastes the same when it’s cold. I’ve...
The Social Virtues Series
Recent Posts
What the Living Do: A Review of ONE ILLUMINATED LETTER OF BEING by Donald Platt
One Illuminated Letter of Being, Donald Platt’s new collection of thirty-two heart-wrenching poems, is oriented around the loss of his mother—itself a disorienting experience, for anyone—that anticipates her death, reconciles itself to it, and resumes living, in a new way.
Three Poems
Outside it’s North Dakota/And November feels like November, but on the moon.
March Pandemique
…but maybe I’m just a loser/who has read too much
Porcelain
I once heard in NPR about a guy in Brooklyn who had a rat appear in his toilet. Apparently it climbed up the pipes and when the man walked in, there it was, looking up at him. No. In this story, the guy first lifted the lid of the toilet. I don’t know if I thought about that fact when I first heard it, but the toilet had to have been closed for it to be true.
Three Poems
The daughters argue / when one begins / to clean. You are erasing / every last bit of him / the younger weeps, accusing / her sister of wiping away / signs and smells of the father
Dental Work/Shiny Object
Looking into my / father’s dead mouth I get / a good look at / all that expensive
A Poem
They say: murderous resting face. & I say. Everyone / is a coward. In a ring of fire. There are only fists. / & liars. I sweep a leg. Bloodsport is not. For honor. / Don’t you know my name. What will you call me /
And I, This Speech: Neil Shepard’s How It Is: Selected Poems
Neil Shepard’s How It Is: Selected Poems gathers the greatest hits from six full-length collections by a poet who is both planted and peripatetic. Founder and helmsman for some 25 years of this journal, Shepard has long maintained one base in the landscape of the Green Mountain State’s Northeast Kingdom and one in the urbanscape of New York City.
The Spark of Life Itself: Michael Bazzett’s Verse Translation of the Popol Vuh
he Popol Vuh creation myth stems from the Mayan oral tradition, and was written down in the K’iche’ language between 1554 and 1558. With its roots in deeply communicative ritual, there is great emphasis placed on the relationship between speaking and hearing, as opposed to writing and seeing—“These are the first words. This is the first speaking.”
Ghost Script: A Review of Nancy Mitchell’s The Out-of-Body-Shop
Michell’s latest collection, The Out of Body Shop, is taut, haunted and emotionally demanding; her poems are archeological exercises: unearthing the past and spreading it in the sun to “burn/off the mold, the stink.”
Spelling Dog Backwards
Write a poem about the way a man / once bitten by a dog can fear all dogs /
for the rest of his life but a woman / once attacked by a man can never say /
she fears men.