A poem BY: WILLIAM CULLEN JR. A spider on the window centers its web like a bull’s-eye on the full moon and then moves diagonally eight legs in motion across its creation to the darkest corner where it will wait for that hypnotic light to draw white wings near until the faintest tremor radiating outward from the dead center sets…
The Cliffhanger Dilemma
Let’s say you are holding two loved ones over the edge of a cliff, one on each arm. If you had to drop one in order to save the other one, which person do you save? Mom or Dad? Brother or sister? Spouse or kid? Kid 1 or kid 2? Do you drop both because the choice is too equal? People try to say that they would use their super-strength adrenaline to pull both up. That’s a cop-out. You have to choose. For me, the answer is easy: Mom, my brother Dan, and spouse. I have an answer to the kid question, but I’m not going to write it down. Though, if the situation arises, I know what I’m doing.
By: Tatiana Forero Puerta When I was little I thought people only died at night. When death came for her at 4pm the sun still shone blossoms pink to velvet opening their tabernacle mouths towards the sky, petals like hallelujah arms. A bird on the windowsill stared in opened its beak silent, unable to sing the piercing song of our sorrow.…
By: Barbara Westwood Diehl Let us be a diocese of two, not parishioners, but a confessional of cardinals, each of us red as papal slippers, a clergy plumed in tongues. Let us be our own absolution, our liturgy a litany of your hymn singing to my psalm, your hallelujah a chorus to my every verse. You and I, we are a…
April 4, 1968 BY:Janet Reed At eight, sunk in the back seat of my dad’s red Corvair, yawning into my pink flannels, I lost faith fast, the way a bandage ripped from skin tears the weave of wound it’s tended. The night of the murder in Memphis, we waited in the graveled drive of a trailer park, my mind on…
By: Marie-Andree Auclair My first mummy, I stared at so long my father wondered where I was. He did not see I was with herin the glass cage sitting compact arms holding my knees staring back. What had they done to me that I lingered undissolved leather on stone prisoner of time not allowed to fade? She found my dreams. We…
A Filament Burns in Blue Degrees by Kendra Tanacea is a haunting first collection of poems released this year by Lost Horse Press. Tanacea is a master of the moment—not straight-on moments, but rather, ones full of visuals and emotions that transport the reader into Tanacea’s world. In this world, the reader becomes a lover, beloved, betrayed, friend, child, and want-to-be-mother, all while ruminating about life and the fullness it can offer.
Her poems intelligently meander on corners of braided rugs and peep through keyholes to see what life is beyond that usual existence of life, her words intoning the mysteries and science of the universe.
In “Keyhole,” the narrator looks through the keyhole of a locked door, straining to see “what is out of sight.” The words deliver full sensory experiences of an ever-widening life:
There is the scent of man, of woman, of cedar.
The eye shifts, straining in its socket.
French doors open onto a veranda
overlooking an ivy-walled garden.
The round moon is rising, giant and yellow.
Star jasmine, star jasmine!
An eye can see far beyond
its scope: solar systems, galaxies,
the Milky Way’s skid of stars.
All atoms, revolving around one another.
I Cannot Dwell in Possibility There is a theory that states there are an infinite number of parallel universes, each a mirror of our own, but slightly different. Each choice made creates another universe: In this one, I went back to college, in another, I stayed in the army. Here, my mother picked up her first cigarette at 14 in…
Translation in the close dark causes tongues to catch on knobbed spines. Unzippering mouthfuls along the length of secret sentences. One language to another opens in a grin, a stutter to a tentative translation of this alphabet of four. Now see, her jaw lit. Why sew ivy cut for the sun? Let barrel-folded fingers wring the kinks straight: Staircased helices,…
The moon hangs in utter darkness,
A smoldering black,
A crack of light
Disappearing almost,
The world paused outside.