Poetry
Contest Winner
This Came First
Behind the kitchen table, April / evening struggles through stippled / glass—corn flung from cobs chewed / into microphones. The children, / / prone to holding after-dinner / spelling bees, wield...
Contest Winner
Portrait of Lady with Cephalopod
Is the girl in the daguerreotype / really staring down the unroofed eye / of the black box in the honeycombed light / / of the studio, dank with elixir /...
Contest Winner
Untangling Gold
1979, Iran / / On the stippled garden rug, mercury dyes my family together / all the dust dancing in some unroofed realm beyond this one. / / Mamanbazorg and...
Contest Winner
Mercurial
We become each other, twenty-four / years and two thousand kilometers / apart. Hard to care about who begets whom / in a hot, Alabamian chapel, or a northern / Ontario church....
Contest Winner
Macular Conception
The car: a mercurial beast, frightened / by his touch or is it he who jumps? His hands / on the wheel, two stippled stones, sinking. / His feet magnets on the...
Contest Winner
safe as houses
The house in a shaggy field, / long abandoned, unroofed, stippled with moss. / Given back to the elements, / / some kind of ancient sacrifice, / shot through with ivy...
The natural
More peace than politics, forgo the heat / and hostile alkali for what curls itself out of me / / dense as the hardwood, as the closed and tense / fist,...
Be/st Frie/nds
Cross-legged in rows on sleeping bags. When asked, her Truths don’t excite. / They shrug, unconcerned, make fishtails in her waist-length hair. / / But maybe this is why they wear...
Locks
he pulls out a stick of eyeliner, / his rat tail has bloomed / into locks / thick as dark feathers / / delicately he draws / a thin black line ...