not that I clove to youlike a ghostly sheet, love rolled my tongue into an Oor another self, taut as a clothesline, some caricature bent to my likenessor some trucker’s star hitched half to the wind, half to the littlepill slipped under their tongues I’ve worked at Water Street BooksContinue Reading

(after Henry Darger’s collection, as told by Olivia Laing) amazing howbits of stringconnect the daysdarn up the weak spotsentertain the eyeflower in a dark roomgutter rescuedhandled carefullyimagine being threaded through a cityjust as you were falling apartknots to puzzle over at nightlines crossing lines, patterningmyriad layers appearing asnesting material forContinue Reading

not that there’s a reef or fish leftthat figured in the last of our dreams, ate whichever lore the fishermanpitched from the clouds too over our heads & we could count on like gold sheep to sink uswithin an inch of that coldest & deepest of sleeps where even theContinue Reading

I would sit in the blazing Alabama heat with my cousins. Picking nectarines from my great aunt’s tree. I must have swallowed a pit,Since I’ve had a knot in my stomach since I was 10. Or maybe the pit wasn’t the first knot. Maybe the fermented juice running down myContinue Reading

They stood before the priest and knottedthemselves together with a vowuntil death do us part.And yet, what if the knotstays tight and death isjust an illusionof escape? Lynette G. Esposito, MA Rutgers, has been published in Poetry Quarterly, North of Oxford, Twin Decades, Remembered Arts, Reader’s Digest, US1, and others.Continue Reading

Do I force it?Do I yank the words to their feet when they are tired and hungry?Do I prime the pump with docile paragraphs, cat stories for work and case studies in my neuroses?Do I trust that the main thing is the meeting itself, woman and words, moon and sea,Continue Reading