The cardinals built their nest in the cow’s skull tucked into brain cavity today is the day of fledglings testing pinion strength of warmth creeping through roots steam whisping above not-so-gold-carp pond ++++++++++++++++++++babies venture out through eye sockets arboreal dreams ++++++inherited desire gives them lift but maybe they have no thought to question from where? […]
Drink this tea, he said, and you will fly naked into starlight. I drank, felt tired, and sat on the couch and ate potato chips. Drink this tea and you will not know yourself. We drove along the freeway by your old school, without direction or speed as light raptured down through barred clouds scudding […]
All night the wind strummed the shingles, while I slept with my jaw like a fist. She wanted sex first thing in the morning to the rhythm of the percolator’s clicks. Her aunt had a real Chagall hanging over the piano. She stocked the freezer with Grey Goose, then traveled for months. We claimed the […]
What can I tell you? I confess from you I learned sweat is poison as well as nectar, & there is no good word for how I linger as you exhale. I confess I am a cracked mirror, & you are a stone, a bird, starlight tickling the fractures. From you I learned jilting doesn’t require […]
A small town. A back door. A young woman at her work chopping, searing, holding. A flash, not so much of light, as the chorus of sight that light trails as it passes by. A strange word, an aspiration, a slight bow of the head, a warm wrapping of wings. There will be lions, later. […]
Days were short and buckled, the dinner to prepare, our table to set, cream and tan plumage to fan in a gold-rimmed goblet, hint of flight. Together we hunted wild turkey feathers, tracked hay fields where flocks lumbered in summer, walked a trail over to the next road, followed it past the last house as […]
(after Clementine von Radics) I open my mouth & nothing comes out—I think, chest caving in, robber of breath, thunderbolted knees hitting the bathroom floor but it felt more like tumbling down a staircase into the basement of a heart that no longer relays rhythm, my shoveled out stomach— a hearse, a grave, a place […]
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 […]
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