from section Four: No One Who Played with the Rolling Stones Ever Lived on Norris Crescent Even five months, six months, seven months later, you still live among boxes. You arrange them into makeshift walls, section off the part of the living room with your desk. This is your study, itself like a giant cardboard …
Her name is Miranda, and she’s an Engler on her father’s side, raised to be proud of the good her family did during a troubled time. To this day, at every family gathering, an ancient Engler is helped to their feet to tell the story of the weeks, months, years after the Battle of Gettysburg, …
I was feeling nostalgic the other day while talking to my wife about the malls of New Jersey. I was surprised she didn’t remember the Woodbridge Mall, the one with the tigers. She’d grown up in Wilmington, Delaware, but that wasn’t so far away. “The TV show?” I said as a memory jog. Nothing. So …
The Father, Deceased He appears in a hospital hallway. On the front porch of her home in Phoenix, with a clipboard in his hands, polite and distant, like he might ask her to switch internet service providers. Passing by on the sidewalk in Riley, the town where she grew up. Leaning out of his yellow …
Every six minutes another word is dropped from the lexicon. Who says there’s no use anymore for woolfell,the skin of a sheep still attached to the fleece? And when did we stop calling tomatoes love apples?I need somewhere in the world for there still to be a fishwife who understands the economy of fleshgrown taut …
The velvet ant is not velvet, not ant. It is a wasp, grooved with sting. If scooped into the muzzle of a lizard, the velvet ant (not velvet, not ant) jackhammers. Its whole body is ammunition. They call it cow killer. Yet it is beautiful, too: encased in orange & white thistle. Spotted red & …
When at lastthe last fires burnt out upon the prairie,trains could be heard passing,mournful as whales. There’s no remedy to beingsecond-rate, I heard the brakeman sayas he & his red light were pulledforever into Missouri. But still I waitedfor you like a radio tower, blinkingquietly in the night. See more poems from Issue 17.1 by …
ROSALIND: They say you are a melancholy fellow.JAQUES: I am so; I do love it better than laughing.—As You Like It Underneath this flabby exterior is an enormous lack of character.—Oscar Levant, An American in Paris Oscar Levant is a melancholy figure, full of barbed wit, self-loathing, and Rhapsody in Blue, which he performed more …
You can see them, if you look closely, in all the old photographs: my fingers flush at the knuckles and nails, squeezed tight as window blinds so no light can slip between. It’s Christmastime in this one. We’re standing in front of the flocked plastic tree. The parcels beneath it, shiny gold with silver bows, …
