We polish our big bellies with creams, we henna Eden vines on them, we Buddha rub them, as do strangers, for wealth. In birth class they tell us your body was made for this. They tell us your mothers were strapped down and drugged. We are capable of doing so...
I hide my power in a cloak I hoard as anger. My jaw gears like a charging bull; hairs horn from my butting forehead. “sky. There is no edge from which to hang my plumb-line. No ledge on which to lay my spirit-level. And you are outside piling logs, working on your own...
Room would like to apologize to Yoko's Dogs for the formatting errors made in "Yellow" in issue 36.2. Room would like to apologize to Yoko's Dogs for the formatting errors made in "Yellow" in issue 36.2. Yellow I her cardinals return from the west printed on napkins...
The wind rolls down the street a rogue wave and breaks in the maples above. Great swells crest in the uppermost branches and it is alone a wonder how the little birds are not shaken loose from their limbs. The wind rolls down the street a rogue wave and breaks in the...
It starts with a river. Green hills, and promising flatland beneath them. All these trees go, and get lugged out of the clearing. The stone near the water is brought to the place where the woods once stood, and also the felled trees that lived there before, and this...
Sister Nora shaved Amritjit and Balwinder’s hair— “export the dictator from the province next door the twentieth century could be home” —Kimberly Alidio, Songs of Americas Sister Nora shaved Amritjit and Balwinder’s hair— walked them home herself by noon, school was...
My brother lost his body bit by bit—a foot, a finger, a shin. The doctors strapped it to a bed, and the mouth screamed on its behalf: Help! Help! With the eyes, my brother spied me, standing in the body of someone who looked like his sister; and the mouth said Health!...
The honourable mention in our 2012 poetry contest, judged by Miranda Pearson. There is the crosscutting of twigs, the bulge of red buds carving sky into fragments of grey waiting, molecules of paint melded by winter’s cold on a window frame that won’t open to spring’s...
Fat flies line the bait box, brush and cling like scraps of cellophane, ragged magnets in the heat. You shuffle to band a lobster. In a heartbeat it’s caught your thumb with a crusher claw, the grip of an angry baby multiplied tenfold. Stupid for a moment, you can’t...
I. Vows A hardscrabble climb up the hillside, I. Vows A hardscrabble climb up the hillside, the thin chorus of marmots raised by my footsteps. If your small brow rested on my back the good weight could hold me here, until the sun hangs just below the mountains, casts...