Self-Invention, or, Torch Song for a One-Night Stand
By Emily Van Duyne
I wish I was an anti-type, but, I’m dull, I’m over
hyped. Today,
genre: Poetry
I’m Sorry, Will Roby, or: Why I’m Not a Language Poet
By Emily Van Duyne
Will, I wither straight
to you, from Atlantic City’s glitz, whatever sin
3rd House Down From The Corner Behind The Red Door
By Andrea Walls
Who would miss it if it wasn’t gone?
Mother Update, for My Brothers
By Deborah DeNicola
She knows who I am. She even knows when I wonder
if she knows
Rewind
By Deborah DeNicola
The walls of the two towers pick up their plaster and dust sucking upwards into blue.
Thinking of the Anhinga
By Helena Minton
Bad habits persist:
The nail biting, the bickering.
Beside the sand trap
like a bull fighter’s cape . . .
Through Birds, Through Fire But Not Through Glass
By Dennis Hinrichsen
The food is cold and so his mind drifts
a blue fin angling toward deeper water
Radium City
By Dennis Hinrichsen
It was the watches I wanted, those radium dials
Glowing like bomb sights
Mowing with Cutlasses
By Laban Hill
Twenty right arms, sometimes together, but mostly not,
arc cutlasses in wide, irregular swings, nearly throwing themselves
At the Window
By Betsy Sholl
If the doctor’s new machine is right, my eyes
are turning into old window glass, warped . . .
Elegy with Sacred Heart
By Betsy Sholl
It’s always winter when I think of him,
gray skies, fog seeping up from the harbor . . .
Notes from the Night Shift
By Theodore Deppe
Driving at dusk to the hospital to sit up with my mother,
I paused at the crossroads where half a century ago . . .
Vertigo & Adagio
By Theodore Deppe
That particular part of the trip—the journey’s beginning—
he hadn’t figured out. Large hills terrified him,
and the train was climbing the north slopes of the Alps.
Smoke Break
By Sandi Johnson
I take my required smoke break during the hours the sun is most reluctant to wake.
I relax on the edge of my Buick and extend my feet to the red hood of my mom’s Sunfire . . .
On Sex and Insects
By Ben Berman
Whenever Marwizi would put down his beer and start winking at those heavy-set ladies of the night, I’d try to slip him a condom before he slipped to the back of the bar. Who has the time? he’d say. I’m practically on fire. The closest my loins ever came to . . .
The Unseasoned
By Ben Berman
When, as guests of honor in Vietnam,
we were served dog penis and the testicles
sat on our plates like Venn Diagrams . . .
Hard Work
By Kathleen Aguero
Hope springs eternal
but I couldn’t imagine how hope,
before it gets to that bubbling place,
forces itself through miles of dirt packed hard . . .
Miss France 1993 [1]
By Jina Ortiz
Mon Guadalupe,
I left you with my patriotic
sash around my waist…
Fruit in Season
By Richard Hoffman
That spring after my brother’s
death I worked in an orchard . . .
World Wide Web
By Kurt Brown
It’s a little like Gulliver, pinned down by Lilliputians—
the whole planet woven back and forth with invisible bonds of electricity…
Popular Music
By Kathleen Aguero
All winter I drove to work Oh, what a beautiful morning!
singing in my head as if I believed in the power
of positive thinking…
Lazarus, Raised
By Kathleen Aguero
Voices fade then roar. Figures shifting
in and out of focus unbind his hands and feet…
Lazarus shoves them aside…
Silvertone
By Dzvinia Orlowsky
Every Friday my father’s voice, drunk
on plum Slivovitz, rose from our basement…
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