Category: Poetry

Five Unfinished Poems for Edward Hopper: Haunted Passages by Matthew Thorburn

—Gas, oil on canvas, 1940 1. This gas man seemslike a banker in his darktie, brown vest, brilliantwhite shirtsleeves,his jacket maybe slung over a chair in the smallwhite station. He tidiesthe rack of oil cans.Turns them label-side out.Bald, unsmiling, alone, not lonely, he lookslike you. And the redenamel pumps waitin silence, heads turnedto look for…
Side A Poem: “Wandering” by Peter Leight

Wandering (Sailing) It’s a small boata child among boatsit only takes a second to walkfrom the front of the boatto the back and backagain under slender stringsof smoke rising over the boatover the water spreadingash on the waterholding onto the ropesto keep them from flappingor lifting sheets of smokethat soften without accumulatingor dissolving while the…
Haunted Passages Poem: “In the Dark” by David Cazden

Doctors gaze at Mom’s CAT scanthe way astronomers lookbetween galaxies.For space is mostly darklike our old staircasewhere I’d turnby the dim-lit landing,angling to the last steppast my brother’s closed door.Once he didn’t make the turn,winding up on the roof―legs over guttersamong boughsswaying like drunken angels.The last day I see Momin the memory wardshe has forgotten…
New Prose Poetry: Excerpts from Girlfriend by Barbara Henning

When my longtime yoga teacher, Genny Kapuler, read what I had written about her, she said, “I feel honored to be one of the beads in your mala, one of your sisters.” I like to think of this book like that, as a poetic prose meditation on my friendships with girls and women. I started…
Haunted Passages: Six Poems from The Witch’s Flight by John Schertzer

The Witch’s Flight 1 I see you rounding the cornerwith your flag. You made it yourselffrom a table cloth, put some knobs on it, bright colorscalled yourself a beginningof something still undefined still nowhere to be foundand I am there beside youwaiting for it to happen. The Witch’s Flight 2 I saw you rounding the…
Poetry for Side A: “At My Grandmother’s Ninetieth Birthday, My Uncle Tells Me How He Came to Accept His Bipolar Diagnosis” by Amy Saul-Zerby

At My Grandmother’s Ninetieth Birthday, My Uncle Tells Me How He Came to Accept His Bipolar Diagnosis smiles and says he realizedthat it’s actually really simple: when he takes the pills, he’s fineand when he doesn’t, he’s not. If I had high blood pressure,I’d take medication for it, he says, and this isn’t any different.A…
Hybrid Piece from the Future: “Genetic Engineering Demonstration Gone Wrong” by Bethany Jarmul

No one believed umbrellas could be grown in fields, could open their faces to the firmament like foxgloves. But I raised the curtain and revealed—to gasps of delight—a wonderful waterproof leaf-canopy with sturdy vine-shaft and real root-handle. What luck! I held it over a child’s head just as the rain roused. The crowd cheered, applauded.…
“There Is News Along the Ohio River”: Four Hybrid Pieces from the Future by Beth Gilstrap

XVII. There is news along the Ohio river: a young man has tied his loosening jeans up with twine and huddles into his denim jacket, a bird peeking out of a nest, but the fabric may as well be a brittle photograph wet and dried a hundred times before he taped it over the crack in…
Side A: Two Poems by Arden Levine

To the Trade Through the driver’s side window comes sunto burn my thighs as I look for new fire out there:the many tongues of trees, that cardinal plumage,those things that turn over and over and over. Most people get about eighty autumns.But, when put that way, it seemsa scam, the rest held below the counter,the…