Recent Posts
A Glossary of Useful Terms from the COVID-19 Pandemic, Upstate New York
I hit “Buy It Now” over and over on Amazon. Big blue tubs of lightly salted cashews hit the front porch softly, pouched in plastic.
Book Release: Anne Graue
Congratulations to GMR contributor Anne Graue whose new poetry Full and Plum-Colored Velvet was published in late 2020 by Woodsley Press.
THE EFFECTS OF ALBRECHT DÜRER’S ETCHING ‘JEROME IN THE WILDERNESS’ ON ACUTE RESIDENTIAL, BEHAVIORAL HEALTH EMPLOYMENT
I found an F. I was at my job, with this kid, a boy, when I stepped on it: a cube, bevel-edged small; a bead: F. Like a lion thing, a thorn. Ouch, I coulda said, woulda, but this boy was watching, and I was wearing my sneaker shoes, their like-Faith cushiony soles. And the boy, no saint, like martyring Jerome’s Lion, he stopped walking when I did. He watched me lift my left foot. The cube thorned into my sneaker’s cushiony sole, like Faith. The boy’s mom is dying, so I Lioned for him: Ha.
To Understand the Stone
pull from the light three times daily / take in water all at once, then nothing all at once / despise the hands of children / upon the lids of the dead, weigh heavy
Wanting
He had been fingering his sax mutely from behind the door. “No pretending you forgot something in the living room. No ‘Oh, I’m just coming out to get a glass of water.’” Lilly had gone through these provisions like a lawyer walking through a contract, even asking him to place hand over heart and swear. “But what’s all this?” he’d said, hurt. “Don’t you trust me?” “Not one bit,” she’d retorted. “I know you, Gaurav.”
Boob
I had never heard her utter the word “boob” before, let alone “boobies.” We were a missionary family, stopping to see relatives in Finland before moving permanently (terrifyingly) to the United States. I had known things would change when we left Kenya, but I hadn’t expected this. Boobies? Really, mom?
Five Poems
Oldguy, invited to a white-tie banquet / honoring him for service to mankind, / mistakes his rented duds for opera attire.
Blackberries Pantoum
Silent, a few yards apart, we picked blackberries / in the wild place Dad didn’t know about. / He knew this much: Men could do us harm. / Some pervert might follow our broken twigs
Two Poems
I marry a column of air. / I marry my own / freedom, and at the altar / it and I merely brush / knuckles. I marry time
This Story Is a Gun
Back then, you would have mistaken me for a happy person. Bright, cheerful. The kind of young woman you wanted your lost-in-his-dreams-of-moneyed-youth son to marry.
You would have thought that I was healthy. That I was pretty. That I was kind.