after Ted Mathys after anonymous nursery rhyme This is the key to the kingdom, rustproof solid brass, cut a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, by a man as old as light. I bend down to test the key, to wait for the perfect […]
Breezes bare a hairline. Small leaves blotch the gentleman’s hand like age. In the city his mind was lit in neon. Now memory persists in a small flowering. There are no mirrors in the hotel room, but many metal doors. Deep in the chest of the other man […]
Josephine “Ina” Cariño was born in Baguio City in the Philippines. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Nat. Brut, Sakura Review, Santa Ana River Review, VIDA Review, New American Fiction (New Rivers Press), One, and december Magazine. She is a candidate for an MFA […]
If I had not learned to write, stupid me, I’d be happy. — Papusza’s confession It’s not the forest anymore but too far to the world She closed the pine’s creaking door She’s not home I was lithe as a forest squirrel even though I […]
I pass my hand over the wooden table to see if it has a fever; I still need to learn to recognize the silent sorrow of objects, the docile pose with which they catch the acid rain of hours. At which school do they teach the serene ache […]
in orbit around the cobalt sphere. It turns a gaze below towards firm terrain, beholds the ones who with belief made real this god of watchers, all-sighted Icarus who, inverted, does not burn, so reaches down to trace plateaus and metropolitan sweeps. Its numinous brainstem churns, yielding names, […]
The goats in the photo were all dead As was the grandpa with his bowed legs and cigarette His tall sister and their Ford Most of the trees were dead Having burnt up with the rest of the house And the corn was […]
If we must play god we mustn’t be surprised when they bow. Like an iron cross falling at our feet, they’ve come to wipe the record clean. Do we concede? Do we look weak? Let’s seek reason free of feeling. What do we do when the […]
On Hart Island, I panhandle purgatory’s sandbox. In search of the dead, I rifle through the remains. What remains to be seen is divine comedy, Dante as he climbs the mount with Beatrice now in place of Virgil. Men know very little about the beginning of the end. […]
Do this he says or try and I try and I say white pine say lilac and snow at dawn say a litany of milkweed fescue and cinnamon fern I say this city is killing me is actually killing me so I wake in the never-dark afraid of […]