I drive my mother home because the train is late, because her hands shake, because my brother doing push-ups after he lost a bet had all of us fearing the explosion in his chest and what are family reunions for? Food. Too much wine. A kickball in the gut. When I pulled the folding chair […]
and my students don’t know a thing about it Ronnie K. Stephens is a full-time English teacher and the father of identical twins. His first full-length collection, Universe in the Key of Matryoshka, was published by Timber Mouse Publishing in 2014.
Three a.m., and night is an oil spill seeped down to the benthic zone. The way a man-of-war is simultaneously individual and colony, I am wide-awake and exhausted. My head, sunken into the pillow, fills with ideas, insights, plans, and epiphanies like the gold coins and suits of armor stuffed inside a seafloored shipwreck. I […]
I used to keep exquisite potted plants. Now, just pots of dirt. My friend Meghann keeps pots of dirt. One with a ceramic hand creeping out, another, a foot. Funny, the things we covet. I only learned to begin wanting again recently. I don’t know where to place my wants. How to justify them, or […]
Prayer flags heave like healthy lungs beneath a five colored sheet. Wind is implied. Or breath. Healing. But definitely movement. All the weightless things around us convulse into terrible ghosted forms, then return to their tenacious dangling. The world ages at the rate we expect it to. We are not so fortunate as cricket legs […]
The man on the other line calls me doll speaks in exclamations: don’t do it you crazy fool! Someone loves you out there! I’ve spilled a beer on my lap and sit in wet jeans with a blanket at my feet. Outside it’s like I always imagined it would be – a dark and dreamy […]
Have you eaten today? I doubt you’d answer. Still, I ask, hoping you open your mouth, that this letter reminds you how I peeled grapefruit on my bedspread, and you pecked, in the way of your fascination with birds and the daintier things, the fruit’s pink flesh right out of my palms, admiring the thinness […]
you are the bell, and I am the tongue of the bell, ringing you —Billy Collins, “Japan” There are days I have been cast (down) in bronze. Gloom pervades me like patina. I am the bells of Mary-le-Bow, long (fallen) silent, mute, tongueless, hollowed out. The claws of my dead dog clatter on the floor. […]
I. You may find it emotionally difficult to dissect signifiers of personhood, says the anatomy professor, meaning these knuckles, these nails still with dirt underneath them, this stiff hand I hold as I trim away skin to the tendons beneath, thin ropes that, puppet-like, pull up each finger. Their names flexor digitorum profundus abductor pollicis […]
This is a photograph of your hands scooping water out of the river named lonely running through the center of your grandmother’s chest. This is a photograph of your knees bent at the altar painted with the years between you & the last time you saw your father cry. This is a photograph of the […]
I knew it would be my last few days in the city, But I wasn’t going to tell you that I was leaving. We made our way toward the candled windows Of Little Italy like a movie from the early 30s, Grainy and aimless and your arm through mine. Our throats were phonographs, notes of […]
Running from Virginia to the other shore you’re halfway there in Topeka or thereabouts which is where you stay and serve coffee in an Edward Hopper truck stop where it’s always dusk and the interstate rolls flat out parallel to the sky straight as a chalked line snapped against a wall no curves or hills […]
Dad got drunk in the afternoons. He slouched in his short shorts and torn Ocean Pacific tee-shirt for hours after work watering the magnolia sapling by the driveway. His sneakers pressed yellow dimples into the St. Augustine sod as he watched the teenage girl across the street bronze in her strapless two piece. His […]
What are they that move Through these rooms without even The encumbrance of shadows? —Tracy K. Smith In a land so sharply lit Of such vast emptiness dry scrubbed Of rock ocotillo and arroyos Framed by mountains canyoned Toothed and mesa flat a sky That won’t release one’s gaze The blues of it with […]
What have we to say that bears repeating? Statements that start out I love … or I’m sorry … those are best. The rest of speech will mostly miss the mark we aim for. Language frets free the instant syllables escape the lips: so little mercy from our mouths. Wonder is best expressed in music, […]
after Mark Rothko’s “Rust and Blue” I watch a woman who smells of Dior bare her hinged fist at a Rothko: My grandson could paint better. As she swings her hips toward Renoir, I want to catch her handbag’s strap and say, Look again. Here, my chest peals with iron bells, my sternum cracks like […]
Then in the motel room they rented by the month—with the kitchenette & the microwave & the mini-refrigerator & cable tv When he sat upright & peered at the ceiling each lung an ocean eyes wide & hands tight on the arms of the recliner My father swears he saw the host of heaven call […]
My mother fashioned my hair +++++iinto rows of wheat. ++++++++++++++++iI am in a plaid button down ++++++++++++++++++++++iand cow girl boots– ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++this is the year +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++iiI will declare my All-American heritage: +++++ino more cornrow pleats ++++++++++++++++ior Southern meals. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++Today I am not my accent +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++iior choice of meal. I am a black stain +++++ion a white […]
Yesterday, a man walking his monkey on a leash kissed my cheek offered sweet potato ice cream. A flavor I’ve never tried. This note— Please burn your bread at the right toaster. Temple sign teaches what to say before I cross the bridge: careful of the footing because the responsibility cannot be assumed about the […]
On Seeing Swans at the Embassy Suites I wasn’t expecting swans. You were partial to dark corners oaken Algonquin lounges smoky with cigarettes and specters, stories we spilled across the bar, but that night you offered swans their pearled splendor indelible, dappled promise of what our lives together could have been— long necked beauties swimming […]
Find, if you can, the brightest stars— her right shoulder, the toe of her sandaled left foot, one on each of her hips. Her halo has gone out. Stars flicker on and off from her lifted wrist, her right hand raised, index finger linking with thumb, blessing the shining northbound lane. How exhausting to be […]
In trying to reach the other side of whatever separates us—blue expanse or two fingertips inches from bridging— I have become as much an anchorless boat rowed too near the horizon as some great vessel moored a lifetime in the shallows. If I could speak what is missing by silence alone I would have already […]
Half-dark, extra mild. I pass these words to the cashier standing behind the bulletproof glass. She returns those words to me with a tone change, eyeing my buttoned shirt ironed as crisply as my speech free of twang. Shot through […]
Here is the street where we shop for ammonium and cabbies deliberate over paper cups. They work the hours of risk from gunshots to breakfast. When a motorcycle manipulates space to crash spectacularly, a woman beyond the circumference of wreckage turns to her man: Why won’t you detonate with me? We are restless, we travel. […]
chlorine is one of those smells that reminds me of home and the first time i tried to kill myself how if you were one of those kids and i was whose parents dropped you off at the pool because it was cheaper than summer camp you know an indoor pool is one of those […]
and I ate all the sweet potatoes. I’m sorry. The raspberries, the honey, that locket you gave me. They’re gone. I was so hungry. I ate the metronome and the black bear skull we keep on the bookshelf. I ate the books. I ate the empty frame on the wall. And our bed— the mattress […]
a child unearths a charm I gave to you. Sand weathered the face of St. Michael into a tarnished silhouette, the vow cut into the silver on the back no longer reads “more than my own life.” A whisper of distorted letters remain as estranged to this child as we are now to each other. […]
in this whiskey bottle sky night the sidewalks purple greased with moon flooded poplar shadows: I walk toward hummingbirds’ wings, the morning green: snapdragons, daffodils trained to bow by an earlier rain: toward the kimono flutters of a water’s edge. John Walser, an associate professor at Marian University in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, holds a […]
Women draped over pianos like spilled drinks, wearing push-up bras and corsets, trying to become long-stemmed wine glasses. A midget in a black suit paints shadows on the floor; he has Peter Lorre’s eyes. Breath smells like cheap scotch, men with broad shoulders and smoke for bones sit at the bar and peel their squints […]
And you cause all the horses in me to hurtle their shoulders against stable walls purpling hay with their thick dripping hunger bruising black boards with their crescent moon hooves And you cause all the kites in me to sing as they singe in the bright teeth of lightning fluttering paper dissolving to ashes twisting […]
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