He Told Me It Would Happen
The future hung over everything we did, exchanging presents, as we liked to do, books and nuts and chocolate, a canopy, sound of bullfrogs and cicadas, over everything we’d done, chocolate and nuts, books we talked about, backroads, gas station blazing in the August night we pinballed into, the restaurant with the singer, tips in the jar, how I ate a cherry tomato. Later, fog rose from the river, settling on both sides of the windshield. We drove past the point we couldn’t see then opened the windows and blasted heat. I wanted never to bounce...
Read MoreThe Courtship of Battlecruiser Dancing Light
We had recalled our ambassador. Dunno why. They don’t tell the grunts that kind of thing. We’re mushrooms: keep us in the dark and feed us shit. I know our countries hadn’t been getting along for years. They said there was no war being planned, but we had guns that could tear apart stars pointed at each other. It was insane, if you ask me. I don’t know how the war started. Trade disagreements. Economics. Jealousy. Who knows? Remember, we’re mushrooms. When the war started, I was a comm tech on Network Omega, the immense shell of laser cannons in orbit around our...
Read MoreWild Violet Featured Works: Week of Sep. 9 (Writing)
This week, Wild Violet’s contributors examine the challenging, sometimes painful, and ultimately rewarding process of writing. “The Poem in My” by David James imagines the bodily origins of different kinds of poetry. “Coleridges” by Bradley Morewood depicts the tantalizingly ephemeral nature of poetic inspiration. “Caesura” by Marilyn Ringer explores the way spaces in poetry make...
Read MoreCaesura
To write the word is to not write in the space where the most important part of nothing occurs. In the Middle Ages there were no spaces. No one read silently. Everything written had to be read aloud to be understood. Some say a deeper consciousness came ...
Read MoreColeridges
all artists are Coleridges with their dreamy art projects and poems already completed in their overheated heads spitting it all out spitting it all out on a page or a piece of rock stuff that has been gurgling inside for two weeks and just then, just then when you’re about to cough up the diamond the roses with all those delicately painted thorns carried by those courting young men in their wrinkled jackets the postman knocks with an express package that you just have to have and you open it and find a garden of trees loaded with cell phones lap tops dripping like pine cones the larger the...
Read MoreThe Poem in My
The poem in my knee can predict rain coming, but not whether it’s a storm or steady drizzle. The poem in my ear hears that train in the distance long before it’s near Linden Road. On a warm spring day, like today, the poem in my eyes can tell the future. It’s not always right, but it has its moments. When I’m torn, conflicted, unable to decide, the poem in my heart tries to speak. Its voice is wet and garbled. Sometimes, I forget it’s there and go about my business, a simple guy hoping for more luck than anyone deserves. And the poem in my skull is the loudest....
Read More