What does one do with the pond that drowns a child? Beyond the obvious things, I mean. Of course the cops should circle the water in yellow, beginning where the child entered the mirror and stretching the ribbon sapling to sapling, waist-high. And if no one […]
—for Huda Al-Jaburi She dreams beneath the washed-out trees & the other, tell me again of his heart cornered like a rat when the sliver moon rises early, delights at last the rabid dog while we rewind our clocks against reason so even the hour […]
maybe that’s how poets become thieves. when we taste you with another man’s eyes, a poem toothed, gnawed through when offered: shabari’s fruit. now we unravel battlefields, ferret through history, limbs tripping over vertebrae just to feel lightning slip a long, jagged finger across our […]
Hala Alyan is a Palestinian American writer and clinical psychologist whose work has appeared in The New York Times, Guernica and elsewhere. Her poetry collections have won the Arab American Book Award and the Crab Orchard Series. Her debut novel, SALT HOUSES, was published by Houghton Mifflin […]
Doug Ramspeck is the author of a book of short stories, a novella, and seven poetry collections, including Black Flowers (LSU Press, 2018). Individual poems have appeared in journals that include The Georgia Review, Slate, and The Southern Review. His short story “Balloon” was listed as a […]
I am but the pin holding up one corner of a reproduction of The Scream, facing an open bay window as a tornado flips a car outside of the nearby nursery school. I am having separation anxiety. I am so far away from the world. The world is […]
Sometimes I wonder if the unquiet mind is itself a miracle, a flintwheel spinning an impending, abundant spark, its fiery possibility a motivating terror. When you are born wet, this fear has little power. And then you dry. Don’t rehearse tragedy, the sisters tell me, but it seems […]
Doug Ramspeck is the author of a book of short stories, a novella, and seven poetry collections, including Black Flowers (LSU Press, 2018). Individual poems have appeared in journals that include The Georgia Review, Slate, and The Southern Review. His short story “Balloon” was listed as a […]
bleed out every month, these: my near sight, the roman nose of my father uninhabited I am what good my mouth too full of teeth, what good these hands, and my long fingers never clasped become untenanted I am become under soft-skulled head, my […]
Remove the tongue from its home in the freezer. Cut a slit through the roof of yesterday. Place the clapper at an available desk. Rotate the vowels during hallway cross-examinations. Repeat while washing dishes for ten to twenty years until they register as white, invisible. Remove from night […]