There’s an unmeasured apogee in summer, when a day holds without time or purpose, when the sun’s insistence is given its due, when the curved apex of living hovers listless and redolent of the sensuous, and for that poised, weightless moment the abs...

Artwork by Mitchell Batavia Morpheus, a frightened boy, mostly played alone. Afraid of noise and strangers, he seldom left his home. But what he feared most of all, was when he went to sleep. After crawling into bed, he’d cower, shake and weep. Onc...

ekphrastic after Christine Crockett “Graphing Uncertainty V” Maybe the problem is I spilled my martini or that it was made with a squashed maraschino instead of an olive. Maybe instead of cherry juice it was actually my heart spilling under the door...

The jar of jelly beans in the window of Bell’s General Store is my only chance to ask Alabama to the carnival. You see, if I can guess the number of jelly beans in the jar, I’ll win the cash prize of twenty-five dollars, and then I’ll have enough mo...

February 21, 11:43pm There are ten thousand little black spiders on my pillow. I shriek and fling it across my room and immediately discover thousands more spiders on my bedsheet. I frantically wipe them all away with my hand as if they were scuttli...

the shape of life distorted stumbles an uncertain sailor legs wobbly speech slurred like lines in the painter's rendering of the gray monotone fog of the mind catacombs of the eclipsing dusk-dawn heart yelling valve teeth open in the discarded ...

after Richard Hugo Richard Hugo says not to choose the topic, not to write a poem because it feels like it should be written. But has he ever been on a beach when a man’s body is fished from the lake, served on a paddle board, and rushed away in an ...

Poem About The Sound Coneflowers Make Against A Stone Bench As I Lay Watching Our Swan, We Had Named Him Leander, Decided He Was King Of The River, His Crown Only Visible By Moonlight w i s p Poem About Chickadees Trapped In A Mall Foodcourt, Chirpi...

Songs from nonexistent birds loop forever overhead. Foliage relentlessly manicured into the picturesque version of tree-lined streets as clean as surgical tables. Outside the Main Street Bakery in Liberty Square, the air is thick with a strategicall...

The creep of modernity into the Arctic happens slowly cable television fiber optics the internet of things all of them allowing the faster purchase of technology all of them requiring electricity and the use of fossil fuel all of them molding the...

and the host seats me so close to you that your clean scent of shampoo and soap persists long after our friendly hug hello and I think about you in the shower and then me in the shower with you and then I make myself stop thinking all together becau...

I tell Nicole about the cone of light inside of which we’re all contained, and how, once expelled from its magical and mysterious source, nothing that exists can go back to where it was born. She holds it like a curse, the knowledge that simply due ...

A few texts. Two hour-long phone conversations. A plan for a Saturday date a week in advance. A Christmas hello text that turns into an hour of texts that turns into Wanna meet up tonight? Three hours of deep conversation at the bar. One make-out se...

While I was still in my mother's womb, I dreamt that I grew taller than the sky, from where I harnessed rain in my palms; I stared down and saw dryness scattered upon the ground like flakes of fallen leaves, prostrated logs of dry wood, broken twigs...

Does it all come down, at last, to slipping onto the subway before the doors shush closed or not? To dropping by a bar for one last nightcap before the morning flight to Rome? Such minor divisions between life and another The width of a bullet A hin...