If the world smells like rain in the morning
and it does not rain.
Nothing latches on to almost everything.
In the morning, the birds settle like soft taps
of erasers on blackboards.
The chalk breaks and skreaks.
min words | max heart
Poetry of the Non-Prose Kind
Leonard Gontarek
If the world smells like rain in the morning
and it does not rain.
Nothing latches on to almost everything.
In the morning, the birds settle like soft taps
of erasers on blackboards.
The chalk breaks and skreaks.
Martin Willitts, Jr.
Maclura pomifera, a tree species native to the southern Mississippi valley
one Osage bow was worth
a horse & blanket in trade
it has convoluted grapefruit-sized fruit
on the female trees
formidable thorns on young shoots
yellow-colored bark
its lush foliage
was sheared effectively into impenetrable hedges
the invention of barbed wire
soon made Osage orange hedges less desirable
Carol Ciavonne
Darling, the marvels of Peru
drift on the water, none whole.
They bloom at dusk. Voices
carry across the lake.
Why not spirit?
Monarch visits daily.
Nearly fifty crows.
Nearly four o’clock.
Shinjini Bhattacharjee
Once inside, I dress my mother’s
eyes from scratch—school it with
the salt of the oxen waves that un-map the
skin of the sea humming against their weight.
Meanwhile, the young tulip tree that she grew
in the backyard softens into the shape of darkness.
Outside, I hear the voice of a man who slips the
bodies of his two buried children through the fog
after his wife finishes counting their ribs, questioning their
bruises that held sufficient grace to borrow another year.
Somewhere, a hare crawls on all fours
and prepares its throat for a capable panic.
Soon, soon, the house grows old. One by one,
the calm leaves turn sleepless in our hands.
Michael Cooper
we start with the bird
and the egg then move on to paint
and magritte
who speaks of the whole
of the dreg we
start with the bird and the egg
crack shell
wing arm
until they beg
as oubliette we begin
to eat we
start
with the bird and the egg
then move on to paint and magritte.
Meg Eden
The abandoned bowling alley has
one hundred and eight lanes. Unpeopled,
somewhere in the mountains, a bell
rings out the number of human vanities.
Nate Maxson
In the future we all float
In the Alaskan smoke,
I can claim to be a mercury-smith
With a hammer and fog under my coat
I stretch silver in webs underground,
Listening devices
Believe me
The river Nesia
Drips its vibrato along the milky powerline
Alexis Rhone Fancher
“I try not to think about dead things and plumbing.” —Maria, Play It As It Lays.
After she hung up she packed one bag and drove to the desert.
Where’ve you been, he said.
He twisted a silver medallion on his chest so that it flashed in the sun.
Nowhere.
She was standing in the sun by the window, brushing her hair.
I need help, she said. I need help bad.
She slept and did not dream.
He looked untouched and she did not.
They mentioned everything but one thing…
She closed her eyes and concentrated on a prayer she had learned as a child.
She would do what he wanted.
She would tell him she could not wait.
The floor of the bedroom where it happened was covered with newspapers.
She had a sense the dream had ended and she had slept on.
She knew a lot of things about disaster.
He adjusted the dial but the sound remained level.
The table was a doctor’s table but not fitted with stirrups:
In a way she was relieved.
She put her bare feet on the dashboard and pressed her face
against her knees.
The late sun glazed the Pacific.
The wind burned on her face.
There would be plumbing anywhere she went.
Caitlin Scarano
To stand in the middle of winter and speak of summer,
your mouth fragile & green.
Every devotion is a twisted rope with two ends.
Think of a burial. How close that word is to boy.
Think of the feverdream as a harvest, the room
spinning even and low as a record.
Or that time you saw two bull moose
antlerlocked in a clearing, snow just starting to fall.
Every aggression is instinctual. Picture the pockets
in your body. How much time you wasted
imagining sons with boneweak men. Last
night you dreamt that your mother was dead
and you inherited her house. All of that softened
glass suddenly yours.
Ingrid Jendrzejewski
Night is a
violence of signs
in which you
made me whole:
soft earth beckoned
and I stayed.
I am filled
and the leaves
need to spiral.