Poetry
South
Grand Forks, Fargo, any North Dakota town with a Super8 / and a Target. To be out of your mind was really to be / out of your body. Feeling it the...
Field Test
Twenty years measuring / strangers’ eyes, entire fields / of vision. Despair and happiness / / look the same in the iris: / synaptic blue roots, wired / cross-attachments. / ...
Poem 39 – A tongue listens to a war
Driven out of Lebanon warm air opens the lines / Slow moving vowels grip glottal, we pucker / Hiss of splayed gullets marks the gaps / Their right legs slightly forward and...
The Angle of Repose
Unlike the western slopes and save for the Thompson River, / the northernmost edge of the Cascade Mountain Range / is dry and compulsive. You climb through Engelmann Spruce / and Ponderosa...
Cockatoos
Yes, we've heard their sad repetitions, / the 'pieces of eight', the rote 'Pretty boys', / dropped from tired beaks like peanut shells; / birds bored far beyond the thinning bone. /...
Breast Reduction
Beep beep beep beep the regular heart beat. / Whoosh, ventilator for every breath. / Acrid smelling blue paper drapes cover her face and head like an / umbrella, / Lay along...
Contest Winner
Alice Underground
Night-blind she fingers the rosary, wraps it round, / mumbles prayers by rote. Only the feel of the beads / slipping through fingers, knots to climb. Railing to cling to / as...
Contest Winner
the colony
china doll in full fatigues / splayed across the jungle floor / / yellowed curls quibble against lex naturalis / encroaching vegetation / moist and fertile / eager to take root /...
Contest Winner
New Old Place
We move into a 90-year-old building / on top of Seattle’s steepest hill. / Cascade of pavement breaking onto / Mercer Street, wet palm of the city. / This reminds me of...