So I imagine my rickety-clickety little car didn’t frighten him much. I remember that he was thoroughly gracious. And tall. Very tall.
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Echoes and Ecotone by Maya Jewel Zeller
When I think of ethnopoetics and the poem as a house, I am immediately drawn to ecopoetics, the ecotone, the edge-things, the house that moves, the shape of something inhabited, like a shell, empty, then full. Too full. Sometimes binding, if it isn’t time to be bound.
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Frosty Diamonds by Michael Bishop
And so it came to be that on that first night, parked on the roadside gravel abutting Hale’iwa Ali’i Beach Park, across the street from million-dollar homes, with the necessities of life stripped to the bone, my nerves humming with a new kind of freedom, the orange glow of street lamps fractured through Frosty Diamonds into scintillating sunbursts unlike anything I’d seen before.
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On The Color Matching System; Or, Marriage by Jehanne Dubrow
I might say last August was a faded blue, like a pair of blue jeans worn to softness.
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Genetic Expression by Nicole Walker
Sometimes families fall apart. It’s not always the Brussel sprouts’ fault. One kid loves cauliflower. Another loves kale. That third baby that no one knew about might have loved broccoli but you will never know whether or not just as you will never know how many cc’s there are in broccoli.
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Syllabus for My Mother by Catharina Coenen
Prerequisite: A hunger for written words. Remember how your mother wanted you to stay in school?
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Honeymoon by Paul Haney
What happened in that pause? Did the driver consider his own attractions? The features he desires in a woman, or even a man? Did he consider how little control he had over those desires?
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Door Girl by Candace Jane Opper
The whole institution seemed to exist by and for men, particularly male musicians, and more particularly male musicians who’d fully bought into the fantasy of rock and roll, which essentially resembles the kind of up-all-night debauchery romanticized in Cameron Crowe’s semi-autobiographical Almost Famous.
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Brief Histories by Joe Bonomo
These images commingle now in memory as my first headlong descent into the strangeness of grief.
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Obituary (For my Cousin) by Emma Kaiser
He tried to form a band with a group that included my high school boyfriend, but kicked them all out of his house when they didn’t take the music as seriously as he did.
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Purple Flowers by Kira K. Homsher
I keep hoping a storm will come and sweep away all this clutter, all these dollhouse messes.
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One Last Time by Cathy Luna
Memory doesn’t work like writing, one word at a time, one ant in a line. It’s more like a science-class filmstrip on fire in the projector, one image blooming orange-white and black into another.
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Onomatopoeia by Robert Yune
Mostly, I marveled at the sound the ring made against the floor—it was a persistent, golden tone that hovered in the air while splitting it. Even decades after I’ve forgotten Damien’s face and voice, I can almost see that sound, can picture that particular vibration in the air.
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Something About Mangoes by Courtney Lund O’Neil
I stopped by the gas station to pick up Christie’s favorite slim Capri cigarettes, two packs. When you were dying, cigarettes and calories didn’t matter.
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A Muscle the Size of Your Fist, and It Pounds by Ashlee Laielli
Under glow-in-the-dark planets and stars, with his blonde head upon my chest and my arms wrapped tight around him, I promised, “I will write it down, I will remember,” as I rocked us back and forth.
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Scar by Cat Ennis Sears
You try on different narratives. holding each one in your hands, then wearing it like a cloak for a time before changing into another one.
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King and Lionheart by Sarah Gorham
The best way to cradle an infant is skin to skin. Rocking imitates the motion of amniotic fluid. It’s common knowledge that a lullaby coaxes a baby to sleep, slowing the child’s heartbeat and breath.
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Butchering by Sangi Lama
I folded countless cranes into existence that year—so many that I can now bring them to life through muscle memory—without realizing that some folds, some creases you can never take back.
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To See Clearly by Amy Hassinger
A song can be a revelation, a reminder of the continual apocalypse that every living moment brings into being: the now that ends with each phrase, the new now that begins with the next. A song can cut through the smog of fear we breathe each day, helping us to—even if momentarily—see more clearly.
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It's A Long Story by Chelsey Clammer
I needed guidance in accepting and claiming my new identity. I needed some education. I needed empowering language.
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