Category: poetry

blue sky was only sun. the kind that keeps you swallowing and raining for the duration of walks or the number of dark needles between your hard toes. warm water softens to let me pluck them from my insensitive skin, the kind that tree roots had inscribed with a marred sense of justice.   cellophane — transparent materials or something i remember better and impossible movements were inevitable in the economy of “way back thens.”   blood, purple, and sour vomit in my parent’s home:…Continue Reading “the culpability of distance to burn a place by Micah Giraudeau” →

Catawba, Virginia         nearest hospital: 20 miles   My mother clings to the passenger side door of my father’s baby blue pick-up– to be traded for a minivan two years later– watches the golden headlight hit dirt and gravel. My speeding father asks, one last time, if my name could be Samantha. She whips towards him, owl in angry flashlight: “She is not coming out of me With that name.” In my mother’s first year of teaching Samantha kept lice for the entire year. She…Continue Reading “Catawba, Virginia by Allie Hoback” →

we used to lay beneath each Sunday, hungry, hands like mouths on our answers, like tarnish on silver: didn’t we know   the roots would remain—rely on the shade— permanence and god and love? Gentle wind, didn’t we know invincible? And what do we know now? Her father owned guns.   My father was one. Watch her walk away, steadying the ark of herself on the bark of Chinaberry Trees when the wind blows. Always, see the brilliance falling out of   her, falling out…Continue Reading “What happened to the Chinaberry Trees by Clarissa Kendall” →

in the back of my Mazda Minivan, steaming like, Hot Worms wriggling up, drowning like, Indiana Jones in some pit, slowly gurgling out the last slips of air.   my lungs can heave, however, cleaved in two they will operate independently, and hot worms will fill up both spaces, little balloons of flesh, ready to pop with one simple instrument – and so –   fucking like a maimed dog i will whimper. ad carve in my stomach a new slit, an inch above my…Continue Reading “SkinWalker by Max Torti” →