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the symphony of bugs buzzing around our brightbodies. the spray acrid as gasoline over our arms,legs, torsos, faces scrunched like zipper spokes. the wind hesitating before reaching to touchthe leaves, our hair sticky with sweat beinglifted briefly before settling again. a reflection telescope takes time to temperature adjust.nothing to doContinue Reading

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I’m here to fetch things that float up,Devoted to the murk of ocean, No hint whatever it isA few feet below, Where iridescence wavesBefore vanishing. I come to this dockEach morning And imagineA flounder, the wise seer, Gazing from his abyssThrough tricks of light At the stranger craning his neckInContinue Reading

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Mostly land and wind here.Barns, silos, woodframe housesfloat on a sea of plowed fields.It’s the last of winter,not quite spring. A storm’s blown in tonight,gusts slashing the house, crashingthe dead aspen onto the dairy shed roof.Thunder rattles the loose sashin the kitchen window.Lightning rips tears in the black sky-plain above.OutContinue Reading

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Inspired by “The Cape.” In the wind of the beach, I climbed into the gorilla.  Its skin hung down like an immense human cape.                –Ben Crowley The Ape  My father always knocked on my door. ‘Perchance, the ape is in?’ He opened my door and helped me into theContinue Reading

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Who are these determined apes, who endurethe cries of cracked bones and vertigo,which precede the treetops?Treetops where these apes reach and graspand check their fingertips to see if maybethey’d grazed the halo.They don’t yet realize, yet still they reach—unapologetically— up toward the twinkle which precedes the dawn “Daniel J. Nickolas”Continue Reading

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We should fear the ocean. Something we know without being told. Enter extremity: A shifting massEasily knocking us to the sandWith such obviousUnrestrainablePower. I almost died in the ocean once But breath broke through The suffering void And aspiring skin Touched the shore again. Since that haunted eveningThe sea andContinue Reading

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Some people are unlikeablebefore they die.I am waiting for someto go ahead.Then I buy their book,read their poemsand like them.I guess I should say writers.But I don’t mean my friend in texasor that one pretty branchlike girl in new york.I don’t mean you—I mean the men and womenwhose books IContinue Reading

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a found poem, after Giannina Braschi Madmen fear no moon, fear no fire. Burns of flesh are poetry. Madmen’s wounds are poetry. Salt is for fish, salt is for death, the poem is not among the dead. Remember, but don’t write it. sleepwalker among cats, thief among dogs, man amongContinue Reading

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Only in that sunless realm between asleep and awakeWill I find you, the shell of my former self, crumpled andLifeless, huddled in the darkest corner, two tattered wingsSprouting from shriveled flesh, cracked and splinteredLike the decaying skin of a porcelain doll left forgotten. I watch as you gracefully unfurl thoseContinue Reading

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Carolyn Adams’ poetry and art have appeared in Steam Ticket, Cimarron Review, Evening Street Review, Dissident Voice, and Blueline Magazine, among others. Having authored four chapbooks, her full-length volume is forthcoming from Fernwood Press. She has been twice nominated for both Best of the Net and a Pushcart prize. SheContinue Reading