Category: Poetry

“Skin Parchment,” a short fiction/prose poetry hybrid by Phoebe Rusch

Interstices Two rutted roads cross in a heat-hazed field. An old man with broken legs leans on his crutches there. He looks familiar, like a recurring dream, a flash in your peripheral vision. He shows you all your lives and the choices made, stringing them in the air before you like beads on an abacus.…
Poetry: “America!” by Margot Douaihy

THE OLD DAYS OH THEY WERE THE DAYS TRUE STORYUS KIDS BOLD AS THUNDER BACK THEN YOU KNOW AT MAIN & FIRST ST HE WAITED FOR US UNCLE SAMHIS GREASY HAIR HIS CRYSTAL-BALL EYES TRUST HIMGET READY KIDS HE SAID WE WERE READ GET READYWHERE MAIN MET FIRST SO MANY CARS TRUE STORYEXPLODING WITH TRAFFIC…
Two Poems by Sean Burke for Haunted Passages

The Moon Lays Down a No Trick Hand When father left office a rag of colts followed on their hind legs. It was the damnedest thing. All that year, Ms. Jansen’s calves were born without bodies. Their heads—strange, unwieldy cabbages— sang ecstatically in the fields. The teens that always plagued the Cinemagic parking lot (and…
Three Poems by Elizabeth Weaver

psychotic denial of pregnancy My sister has a hand-sized birthmark the color of blood on her neckwhere the umbilical cord had been wrapped around her—her fist beneath, first of many quarrels with the world for a redhead born against the August heatwave and into this family. That day I had a fever, sprawled across found furniture and…
GIF Poem: “rorschach test insecure love poems for the 21st century” by Olivia Muenz

*Ed.’s Note: click image to view larger size. Olivia Muenz is an MFA candidate in creative writing at Louisiana State University. She received her BA from NYU and is currently the Digital Media Editor for New Delta Review. Her work is forthcoming in Salt Hill. @oliviamuenz.
“After the Hot Dog Eating Contest,” a Flavor Town USA poem by Avery Gregurich

for Dean Young I too have to start with a bite out of the middle part, the place in the record that isn’t music. Sweet drooling bits of black vinyl back onto the platter of hot dogs, waiting, patient between Surf and Stillwell, Coney Island. How do you take your dog to the vet without…
Michael Sikkema Haunted Passages Poem: “How to Be a Haunted House”

1 After the first rainshove up what’s beenburied in the flowerbedsThe teeth. The toy trucksThe steak knife 2 Use yourfaceto bendthe others 3 Bleed brighter 4 Stay inthe sharp partof the storyuntil it hurtsright. Findthat smallvoice andstretch it 5 Fog the changes 6 Manifest your walkersin earlier clothes 7 No neon 8 No fanny packs…
“Every Theatre Has a Ghost,” a poem for Haunted Passages by Heather Lang-Cassera

—for a former Siegfried & Roy stagehand You were the one to cut the illusionist himself in half with your followspot; to light him at low level; to hold the cable with perfect tension in the dark, before the shift in zenith, and then coil quickly hand over hand; to walk past mirrors, O, such…
Cindy Savett: Three Haunted Passages Poems

Rachel and Mother Speak Their Lines Clay Mother,drop down through me darkly, lash my winds toyour breast, swaddle my singed urge forendlessness, Blind Mother who stumbles over my ransomed pulse. Rachel, I stagger through trembling grades of your silence,weave torn time with your spent breath; stay etched, child, on my yellow-edge days. Sky Daughter, you…