Forgetting
Hayscent fern in one windowpane, rhododendron in another, red barn siding— you’re staring out the window, as if what you see out there might wake the inner word you want, that fugitive, unfaithful word...
View ArticleWorking with Stone
Making a wall stone by stone as you used to relish doing, or stacking stone on stone in the woods to make a cairn, is like building a sentence word by word. If that’s so, this poem is a word cairn,...
View ArticleBraying
Richie Hofmann – Braying This is the time of day we hear them coming back, when the first sunlight drops to the field like an animal being born, slick and shivering where it falls. Their hooves grind...
View ArticleZebra Finch at Petco
Holmberg Zebra Finch at Petco The male tweezes a bald millet stalk off a sahara of graveled paper. The pert watch movements of his head ignite a ember on each cheek, buff bright the beak’s rose hip...
View ArticleIn the Pentlands
Allison Funk: In the Pentlands Here, where I am buffeted, barely able to stand, a kestrel hangs impossibly still in the wind. I envy its otherness, its look of being somewhere else—...
View ArticleHike to the Black Madonna
Hike to the Black Madonna The aching muscles of my calves began to tremble just as the forest broke away. A white river threaded the valley floor far below. I turned to the right and above the tips of...
View ArticleWhat Enters, What Alters
Many men moving, trying to get something out of the lake. Bending. Pulling. From a raft with yellow crime tape around it. I have to stop dancing to look. I have to find the binoculars, and turn off the...
View ArticleLullaby
The man has been gone so long, his own child won’t know him. She and the woman, they must have their own stories now, their own songs— some for hauling wood and water, others to sweeten the girl’s...
View ArticleThe Story of the Mountain
Home is not what the woman had imagined. Late fall, the fields are cropped to stubble, the mountain already rust and smoke. The trees must have flamed here but she’s too late. The man has threaded...
View ArticleThe New Moon Economy
We’ve all been in towns that wouldn’t have us, whose woods beyond the cemetery hide houses made of leaves, their windows lit low by peat fires, the slow stink of heat rising through trees then sinking...
View ArticleRock Wallabies
Because of their isolation, many colonies of wallabies are going extinct —Sydney Morning Herald At dusk I kill the truck and...
View ArticleNovember
Into this furnace of color a cold rain starts to fall, as if to warn the populace of leaves to pack and go, the armies of winter are on their way.
View ArticleCinema Verité
The movie I grew up in was in black and white, or sometimes in the sepia memory tints things with. The soundtrack was a Victrola playing “I’ll Get By.” The stars were a father with his important...
View ArticleSwift Among the Willows
“all are mere productions of the brain” J. Swift, “On Dreams” Midnight in the deanery, gangrenous flies, his mind having moved from honey pot to excrement, as when God invades the ear....
View ArticleAfter the Meeting, a Red Fox
If ever more ravened, junked, numb-sconced I could not recall it, sopping in aftermath dusk’s blossom bock, ink-musk ale at rusted window screen, the annual carnival a neon embolism blurring the...
View ArticleReplacement Parts
Replacement Parts recording Drake lived in our shed for a month during the summer. At least that’s what we called it. The shed, our shack, a hut held up by the air itself. Not that it...
View ArticleMeditation on “In Memoriam”
Not “is survived by,” that gravely passive voice to deactivate the dead, but “He leaves his wife of fifty years, Constance,” as if the journey were his to determine, and compared with this life the...
View ArticleThe End of Southern History
And I return to the bear, claw marks and scratches on the tree, was it oak or pine, where the tinker chained his pet while he went from house to house hawking knifes and patching pans. A story told to...
View ArticleStrangers at Twilight
Huddle – Strangers at Twilight The black mare with the white diamond lets me bump foreheads with her across the fence, Then we’re at a loss. I was lonely the whole afternoon. All day her girl didn’t...
View ArticleBear Goes Metaphysical
Huddle – Bear Goes Metaphysical If I’m not a bear, thought the bear– and wistfulness rose in him, maybe he was a falcon, a redwood, a slug, a raccoon–but then his bear brain made him look down at his...
View ArticleExcursions to the Town Dump: Poets and Their Notebooks
Late in Queen Victoria’s century, a young Jesuit seminarian set the following entry down in his notebook: “April 27, 1871….Mesmerized a duck with chalk lines drawn from her beak sometimes level...
View ArticleWings, 1989
That day in July my mom came out of the house, wiped her soapy hands on her thighs, and told me to get my lazy bum up off the grass and go weed the peas. She wore rolled-up blue jeans, a cotton blouse,...
View ArticleSoothsaying
Soothsaying Audio The clanking of the car’s engine ceases a few miles outside of town and Cliff and I settle into it, the wide quiet. We’re told that here, high up and in fall, aspens turn whole...
View ArticleBuying the Cross at Bible Camp
Buying the Cross at BibleCamp Audio I’m eating rice krispies when my mother asks me whether I’d like to go to church camp. She pours corn flakes for my little sister and douses them with...
View ArticleTranslator
In the ninth summer of the conflict, I was hired as a translator for a foreign officer. My wife was furious. For days, she refused to speak to me other than mumbling That man is the devil even though...
View ArticlePermian Flats
”Permian Flats” was runner-up in the 2nd annual Bevel Summers Prize for the Short Story. It had taken them three days to find the Spragg boy. A migrant worker heading to Permian Flats had...
View ArticleGoran Holds His Breath
Althouse: Goran Holds His Breath The birds on the water have not heard him yet. Once they do they will burst upwards in flight and he will press the trigger. A gaggle of nine geese, necks huddled,...
View ArticleThe Ice River History Museum, Formerly Saint Catherine’s Convent
Hollmeyer_IceRiverHistoryMuseum Dot hobbled along with her walker, making apologies for moving slow since her fall. The docent asked what happened, and she explained about the dark cat in the dark...
View ArticleOde to Girl with Hand on Barbed Wire
Somewhere between McCook and the grid of rural routes she had traveled to reach the farm, Letty had applied a coat of lipstick. She liked to drive with the window down, her hand pressed flat against...
View ArticleHer Last Boy
Let me tell you bout my boy, she says, the way they do, the gnarled walnut knuckles working like the gnarled walnut of their cheeks swollen with that pride that slows her speech from the gallop it also...
View ArticlePassage
John Casteen– Passage Bollard & bulkhead, cormorant & clew, spindrift, scene: the pitchkettle Tropic of Capricorn. The city. The sea in its unsurprising windrows; the glyph of the break-...
View ArticlePeregrine
Peregrine (audio introduction 2012) I saw Melvin Wood, The Tree Man, in Mall Mart while I was buying travel size toiletries for my upcoming Cruise to Nowhere. To keep him from seeing me, I turned to...
View ArticleFirst Lessons on a Whore’s Mouth Harp
The best still play all tongue, and most with old love letters and lungs. But sinners choose to kiss all tooth and grind that steel as pelvic bone, or bit, or even burden. Coo arrives less like a doe’s...
View ArticleMine
I am a woman; I am a mountain, I hover over you, a thumb laid hard across the thickest vein that pulses fuel down your neck. I’ve locked my knees beneath oceans, and for nine hours at a time, I’ve...
View ArticleFirst Person
One lies on one’s back in the woods, savoring the sun, and for some reason one has opted for what Fowler calls the “false first person pronoun”—one, that is, over the other. One brushes an ant from...
View ArticleNightingale Capability
Italy, May, 2011 We’ve been in Bogliasco a week before we understand the bird that’s wakened us each miserably early morning is a nightingale. I am pleased by this just as I was years ago, when I had...
View Article“I am holding onto the gut.”
wetatuhneesáhUt. I am holding onto the gut. Wah. Once they were accepted they were allowed inside—White men. D. D. Mitchell, Indian Agent, among them. They sent a boy. The Arikara men. Bear...
View ArticleThe Pointer
“The Pointer” received the 2nd annual Bevel Summers Prize for the Short Short Story. Swallows fly in and out the broken windows of a V-12 silvered by weather, our great-grandfather’s ancient Sunday...
View Article“A House upon the Height–”
A House upon the Height recording —Emily Dickinson The fence that runs the road hems the house in, thigh-high grass and clover tight, pushing back through the wire slats. The farmer’s wife next door...
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Secure the Shadow by Claudia Emerson LSU Press (2012)
Reviewed by Lisa Russ Spaar Claudia Emerson’s poems have always stalked liminal territories—abandoned houses, vestigial buildings reclaimed by wildness, bodies caught in birth and death throes, the...
View ArticleTrophy
This prized fish on the wall in our suburban split-level is a rainbow trout, an identification I know because my husband made a point of telling me this, more than once, when he brought the fish home...
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The Chameleon Couch (FSG, 2011) by Yusef Komunyakaa
Reviewed by Philip Belcher Komunyakaa Review Erudition as Disguise On occasion, an eager and adept reader happens upon a poetry collection that satisfies immediately. The lyric intensity of individual...
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The Last Child by John Hart (Minotaur Books)
Caveat lector: I seem to be in a meddlesome mood. And from the starting gun, I don’t want you to think that I’m recommending this book for the reader primed for precise and evocative, character-driven...
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Nightwoods by Charles Frazier
Recommended by Andrea Siso Nightwoods Review The lean, taut narrative of Nightwoods creates a story in which the setting holds as much spark as the characters, and is the central factor that brings...
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The Coldest Night by Robert Olmstead (Algonquin)
Coal Black Horse and Far Bright Star convinced me that Robert Olmstead can write as well as anyone around about the solitude, the boredom, the hellish waiting and the sheer horror that beset men at...
View ArticleFor the Relief of Unbearable Urges (Faber and Faber) by Nathan Englander
Recommendation by Sophie Xiong 2012 must be a banner year for Nathan Englander. He has (at long last) come out with his second collection of short stories titled What We Talk About When We Talk About...
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Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel
Recommended by Sarah Kennedy If you love the Tudors, you will probably like Hilary Mantel’s Bring up the Bodies. The sequel to her Wolf Hall, the book continues the story of Henry VIII’s secretary...
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Confederado by Casey Clabough
Recommended by William Wright Casey Clabough’s first novel, Confederado, is the story of Alvis Benjamin Stevens, a confederate soldier of central Virginia who returns home four months after the...
View ArticleTo Clare, a Rehearsal
Die lieder sind verweht . . . (“The songs trail away in the wind”) – O Kuhler Wald Johannes Brahms, Opus 72, no. 3 I am sorry to disturb you so...
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A Face to Meet the Faces: An Anthology of Contemporary Persona Pieces
A Face to Meet the Faces: An Anthology of Contemporary Persona Poetry edited by Stacey Lynn Brown and Oliver de la Paz (Akron, 2012) by Nick Ripatrazone Dislocated Identities, Found Personas Edward...
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