Category: Print Archives

“Hard,” a poem by Colin Winnette

We were born hard. We own a pit bull. We don’t eat much. We’re quiet. If you saw us on the street, you might cross it and enter a store. You might avert your eyes. You would try not to look at our pit bull. Or at us. We are gray and stiff and ungentle.…
Five Mathematical Poems by Timothy Wojcik

Mathematics IIIIIIIIIIIIIIII Start with one body, and one sky. End with the sky in the body, and one sky. The organs are in the middle of the sea. The sea is in the middle of the flock of loons. The flock of loons is in the middle of the enormous heart, mathematically speaking. An enormous…
Phil Spotswood: “The First Engineer,” a poem

learned momentum from falling birds, howthey hit the water faster than the fish could dielearned that trees heaped together couldform a sort of barrier, to keep things in or out—how,also, the laying down of two bodies couldcreate new space and angles the first engineer came to understandthe language of snake-speak in grass, howindentations point towards…
Poetry by Sean Thomas Dougherty: “These Ordinary Days”

Out of the brown bag I placethe red wine and sack of sugar I swing our eldest daughterdespite my swollen knee and fix you coffee with cream,and the clouds swirl like the unsayable our daughters curly headedand crying, run out the glass porch door,I watch them through an invisible windowLike the one between us and…
Poetry by Jim Daniels: “Boo Boo”

Someone’s feelings were hurt. BadBoo Boo. Oops, Boo Boo. Some-one’s feelings. O I felt your feelings,wet smooshy feelings.Big Bang Theory of Hurtfeelings. Dealingswith feelings. Gel and a wetcomb. Band-aids and Cand-aids. Bloody sweet feelings.The Long and Shortof feelings. Errors-in-the-scorebook hurtfeelings. Wheeler-dealer feelings. O.Just O of hurt feelings.I am so O for yourhurt feelings. Can I…
“Ruidoso, Carrizozo, Ruidoso”: Short Fiction by Adrian Van Young

Billy Sue Dolan was from Ruidoso, one town in a hundred New Mexico towns. Except Ruidoso was in Lincoln County, the most violent part of that desolate state, where William McCarty or William H. Bonney or Billy the Kid, he would come to be known for the twenty-one men he’d reportedly slain, had seen ideal…
Knar Gavin: Two Poems

My Cooter, Your Us upon being expelledfrom the uterus& them brigade my neighbor cuts offall our hair and rollstowel around skull screams our uteruses have been pluckedout, outs me out thoughshe probablydoesn’t meanours—hers or mine—but thePlatonic Table Uterus, thatuterus, and i suppose i’m supposed tojust trust—to believe it’s there,and sometimes she she is uterustlingin the…
Dear Brother Excerpts: A.M. O’Malley Poetry

Dear Brother Three babies came between us. They were all sucked away or withered on the vine. The summer you were born I had buds forming on my branches. I had touched tongues for extended periods of time with boys who thought I was fifteen or sixteen, boys with skateboards, boys with ripped collars, boys…
“What Has Become of Freedom?”: A Poem by Ace Boggess

—Bob Hicok, “To Find the New World” The trouble with freedom is being freenot to think about freedom or desire escapeto freedom. Easy spending too many hourswatching the same news on televisionwith nothing new about it to make it newsexcept in name. The machine god pulls its levers &an airplane disappears—sleight of a clockwork handas…