Reading ‘Elephant’
A sight-reading child, I thrilled to the image sheathed in a word— elephant— the elongated contour, the tall l, h, and t, transporting me to an African savannah, to baobab trees and a striped big top, a sequined gymnast in arabesque on a blanketed, thick-skinned back. Circus of the preposterous—who created your enormous folds? That thousand- muscled trunk, your euphonium...
Read MorePit and Pit
after Brenda Hillman From different roots, the same word evolves with opposite meanings. As in one that’s both the hollow and the filling seed. Evolves, as in takes many lives. Much flesh turned on the spit above that ditch. Many too tough nuts spit coolly out. Across the room, a young man with gelled hair cranes over a scoured plate to smile more exclusively at the ingenue who has eaten nothing. Their first date. She has diddled the bok choy and two flies are parading on her arctic char. He may never be more eager, she never more enthralled. You know how it...
Read MorePuritan Spelling
We hereby give up The. We relinquish long & lovely spellings, like the luscious inkiness of glamour. We offer up italic, using, as it does, more energy than soap… We end ellipses. We sacrifice extrvgnt vowls which have trvld hlfwy round th wrld, 4 us 2 cn consme thm out f seasn. 2 say nothing of the heartless ongoing waste of Silent E. Dubl letters, too. we renounce the upprcase as false idols. punctuation alowd only in deep winter if w/...
Read MoreSeeing in French
Maybe in Greek you can say time is something real like tides and sand, trees dividing light. Maybe in Sioux snows will do and months can be when raccoons wake from a thaw and when geese lay eggs in the reeds. But after picking cherries and a summer rain I imagine the moment in an alphabet of no fixed line. I see the sweet meat bloom from blackness to eternity with nothing in between. Maybe in the tongue which gave us our mind we can measure frequencies like fruit and water. But in my wet shirt and heavy from eating, in the dreaming that comes from being full, I keep trying to get...
Read MoreFeatured: Week of Feb. 18 (Winter)
The stark, cold days of winter can turn us inward, as we strive to escape — but cannot forget — the cold. Saul Greenblatt’s humorous short story, “Welcome to the North Country,” provides a vivid picture of winter in the northeastern U.S. Jim Dwyer’s poem, “nothing more than feelings,” captures the tumult of life across the decades, punctuated with cold. Robert Lietz’s poem, “A Need for Speed,” evokes nostalgia for the hard experiences of youth, through winter imagery. Chris Castle’s story, “One...
Read MoreWinterland
“Daddy, what’s summer?” “You know, when the sun gets warm and all the snow melts and the leaves grow on the trees, and there’s grass and flowers everywhere.” Bryce Frost, down on one knee, looked up from tying the laces on his eight-year-old daughter’s figure skates. Her little nose wrinkled, and she tilted her head the way she did when she thought he was pulling her leg. “Don’t you remember?” Surely she was old enough to remember last summer. She shook her head. “When does summer start?” “Just a few more...
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