May 2024
In this issue
Contents
Picture
When four baby daughters up in the sky drain her anaemic heart, tears on Granddad’s photo against her riant chest, I crawl on her lap – My hug means to tell her, yes, she will see them again but please, not now.
Death Dance
There were car accidents, illness, and war. Dia de Los Muertos arrived just in time. I surrendered as the ants overwhelmed me. Beneath blue skies and papel picado.
True North (After Louise Glück)
Look for mentors and they’ll materialize, peer around corners, mouthing Psst with pursed lips,
Waiting
A girl perched on a Translucent ocean In a dusty rose tunic On rowboat the color Of old paper, like the sky, The foam on the water,
Cyclicity
Hovering over my body, in a tangled mess of silver threads going snap, snap, snap, I realise you were the fibre and tendon, and glue that held while we ended and began and ended and began;
agarita
but the berries do not know they grow because they grow and only know how to grow in the front circle in the backyard up and down the gravel road all along the fence line
Lemons
Yet there the seed waits all the while and dreams of its own life — my only way of reaching it is with my paring knife.
don’t try so hard
I stood over him as he sat at the table setting the book down automatically in front of him he looked up and almost made eye contact asking, “Who do I make it out to?”
Still
“Pocket full of posies!” She watched as a little girl appeared two houses down, dancing down the sidewalk. She was holding a doll in one hand, waving it wildly over her head as she sang. When she reached the old woman’s house, the child spun around and threw the doll into the air.
One Family
His aunt stayed angry until another American came to visit, a tall lady with yellow hair and lime green glasses. She took Sami back to the ruined home, snapped pictures of him in front of it. The tall lady paid his aunt a lot of money, enough to move to the mountain camp, where everything was better.