Luminous—the ink you pouraround bullet holesto paint blooms pain turned topetals, terror—tostyle and stigma Ovaries fill withjuice, and we too learn:lives are fragile & can get broken As for life, it says yesAlways—yes No usedenying it Oksana Maksymchuk is the author of poetry collections Xenia (Piramida, 2005) and Lovy (Smoloskyp, 2008) in the Ukrainian. Her …
1 On All-You-Can-Eat A sentence is not always a consequence waiting to happen.The edges of the park were yellow-taped from the public.When the first man landed on the moon, I only wanted to gohome. No one listens to the radio after the hurricane makeslandfall. I dreamt of walls papered with ripped bougainvillea.People always say the …
Pelvic bones are nothing like wingsor blades. I know because I saw them in a meadowat Mount Diablo. They must have come from a mother cow,birth canal a wide hollow. I touchedthe wild rye that pulsed inside.*Once, in the desert, my motherand I argued about the shape of the earthuntil I wept. Wind chimes jangled …
Neil had volunteered to cook. Inez’s best friend, Beach, was coming in from the West Coast, and she felt he could use a home-cooked meal. Inez and Beach dated briefly in college, and while Neil hadn’t unriddled all the details of their breakup, the short of it was that they preferred each other’s company in …
Last summer everyone I knew was trying to give me advice, but something made me certain that anything worth listening to was going to come from Carl. Carl was my boss at the Maple Grotto, a retirement community with on-site hospice care. Every morning he would gather the grounds crew and maintenance guys in his …
“The peephole is installed backward,” my one-night stand said as I sat up in bed. We were in his high-rise studio apartment. “I keep meaning to tape a piece of paper over it.” I thought about what this meant. A tiny aperture gave passersby in the hallway a fish-eye view into the bedroom. It wasn’t …
