On:

CENTO 1: MY ECHOING COUNTRY (Marrying Neruda’s Love Poems with Rukeyser’s Book of the Dead mining disaster poems) In love you have loosened yourself like seawater. Or uneasy, wounded by me. In my body, bells, dove wings with eyes tired of my echoing country and its thrust of live coals,Continue Reading

On:

Beth Babbitt’s parents died after an airplane slid off the runway in Chicago because of ice buildup. By the time they were gone, she was already grown, living alone in a floor-through apartment in downtown Manhattan. All there was to do was call the family lawyer. There was no funeral,Continue Reading

On:

In a perfect world, motherhood would not be equal to loneliness, but hers was not a perfect world.  She was nineteen when she met him, when he took her to the rocky beaches of that town, the town where nothing ever happened and no one ever left, to feed theContinue Reading

On:

It was a terrible misunderstanding that started with a misspelling. Knowing you are the victim of vocabulary is of little comfort or redress when you are chained to the wall of a dungeon awaiting your pyre. Knowledge does not sate your hunger. It does not ease the aching cold inContinue Reading

On:

Let us start with the fundamentals, the first thing that you will need is an alchemic circle, for there the essence of Truth converges and through it everything flows. Bear in mind that not just any circle will suffice, you will have confine within it a square, each point ofContinue Reading

On:

Marco had schizophrenia.  He thought he was magic. When he walked down the street and was in his normal state, he acted with kindness.  He gave the few coins his sister gave to him, to the ones with signs that said “HUNGRY.” He wasn’t hungry.  At least not today.  AtContinue Reading

On:

Each grey hair I grow has powers unknown To all but the torchlight that never blinked In the storm that unlit our beacons, thrown Into darkness by the ardour that winked And sputtered hope. All the while that serene, Stolid tube of trapped and vapid light stared On, through theContinue Reading

On:

From Jacob’s Jack and the Beanstalk & Christ’s Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus & others There once lived a young prince who, after his five elder brothers had each met an untimely death and his father had fallen ill, took over the daily affairs of the kingdom. HeContinue Reading

On:

It was spring when Mrs Pohvalich went down to her husband’s workshop in the basement and hammered together a sign declaring: Palms Read. “Yelena,” said her husband, Morris, as he watched her struggle up the steps, plywood board in tow, “where are you going with that?” “To the front yard.Continue Reading