GASTROPODA

As my siren-haired daughter tells my nurses about her honeymoon cruise, she overuses this phrase for stopping in the thin channels between wharves — as if these exist only in her drowned father’s country — and I start saying how, as a girl, she sashayed beside my stone wardrobe in my whispery chemise — the one I wore for vanishing men who never berated me like her father did, not ever, not even for dreaming open-mouthed — but I keep waking up to the rough, unwanted song of hi

He’s a silver dollar sea turtle in my sand-sugared palm with flippers the size of kidney beans and ink-stained eyes that have never seen stars. At my feet, waves lap hungry and the air is snowed with burning salt. Nothing stops for a handful of life with a paper-thin shell. We stand at the edge as it chews with stone-ground molars and a bellybutton moon and I know I have to unbend my pebble-kinked fingers because the only thing between the first day and second day is the lett

Gerry and I stood beside the stage, watching James McMurtry's guitar solo. Aficionados called McMurtry a “shredder.” His frenzied notes reminded me of a hacksaw. My boyfriend wrote songs and played 12-string guitar like he’d been born with the instrument in his hands. Gerry’s voice sounded melodious yet commanding. Adulthood brought him a series of retail jobs. He didn’t think he deserved better. As the music swelled to a crescendo, Gerry swayed beside me, eyes closed. 56 a

For Chrysty my wife doesn't like how prosaic I’ve gotten now lately in her dedicated poems. "you might as well say I'm the bag that you use to get up the dogs’ shit off the pavement" she says – but you are. I'm sorry – that's one way to say it in poems – that my life would be worse off without you in every small way. I don't know – when you're gone it's like losing a finger and trying to play the piano. like sleeping without any duvet, without any pillow, without an

It’s been many years since I’ve asked the idea of god to work for me. Like when I observed a finch drink from a teacup the other day in the neighbor’s backyard. A teacup left outside all winter on a table, forgotten, unnoticed, except by the chirping, suburban finch who, descending from a nearby poplar to perch on its weathered rim, tips her head up and down to reach the little splash of recent rainwater on the bottom, tasting, for a moment, the cold sweet

I found you sitting at the kitchen table. When I asked who you were, you said you were gravity. I laughed until I noticed that your arms sank into the tabletop. When I asked what you were doing in my house, you said you were everywhere. I turned on the brewer. — Out the window, a leaf drifted to the ground. You smiled. I told you to help yourself. You went for coffee, your feet settling into the tile as if it were plush carpet. I told you I was going back upstairs to shower.

A hot summer day, my head a wet melon. As I sip cranberry juice on ice Theodore Roethke opens the screen door and sits beside me. For someone who has been dead for decades, he’s as articulate as ever. I ask him how his poems are coming along. He says a few are almost in bloom. I have some of my own that have buds— sometimes they blacken and die. I offer him juice. He says he’d prefer a drink. Oddly, I can offer none as I haven’t gotten to the liquor store yet. He p

We run like racehorses: press ourselves tight to the rail, push against the stream of traffic, blow strong and heavy. A check on the rein to keep us steady. On the turn I slip, lose a hindleg to the thin gleam of ice which surfaces the mud. Slow down! My heart thuds, last night’s dream working itself loose like a shoe: a wild horse in my house, a biter, untamed and uncouth. May Grier is from and lives in London, UK. She has had poetry published in Ink Sweat and Tears and The

When I consider moving, I think how I can always take a quick detour to gaze upon a body of water. If I’m feeling contemplative, there’s a small creek that runs through the neighborhood. I gaze over the railing to watch dragonflies and listen to the murmuring of running water. If I’m lucky, I’m joined by a few sunbathing cats. When I want more of a disruption, I walk towards the intersection of Lake and Lincoln. Especially after a big rainstorm, I can hear a dull roar as I ap

Our lives packed into storage boxes, the heat wave lasting all week and into next, moths feasting opportunistically on my sweaters like lye burning through the valleys of a topographical map, the drip drip drip of it eating into carpet fibers, my tongue unable to find a home in my mouth, you’re gonna get caught eventually, but maybe that’s kinda the point—it's nice to know someone’s watching over you, even if it’s just the loss prevention guy at Target. Hana Damon-Tollenaere

Microorganisms bathed in an array of stars twinkling gas warming my body as if I too am a constellation ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Ranch If ranch dressing were a place, it would be the opposite of a place— it wouldn’t be a farm, or a ranch even, but a warm home on a warm day, when the heat outside is cleaner, more forgiving than the sticky inside where forever a cool breeze is less artificial than air con

Waiting Burnt ochre sunshine is grazing our shoulders as we sit on the steps of the Victor Emmanuel building in Rome waiting for our tour bus. Impatience fights with tiredness as we wonder about the delay. The hours tick by, the years. Decades. Sometimes I’m still sitting there. Transfixed Today I have put on happiness (after many weeks) like a new dress. Clean, light and hanging smoothly. I am fit for the ball and I’m sure my dress won’t powder at midnight and the mic

It happens when you’re thinking about other things. It’s been this way for almost everyone, and now it’s your turn. Some sleepless...

After her divorce, Marie began to suspect she had a book in her. She lay on her back and poked at her stomach. The book was small, like a...

scroll stops, heart drops there you are interrupting my feed four years passed, in a flash you’re the same why wouldn’t you be? mr....

At the softball game, the mothers band together, the fathers together. It’s tradition. No one violates tradition, unless the spillover of...

As we shuffle into class on Wednesday, near-sighted Nellie spies a shiny golden apple on our teacher, Mr. Ward’s, desk. The apple has a...

Autumn, Part I A Golden Shovel after Nora Ephron’s “You’ve Got Mail” Midnight, the bed in Milan, you and I Still in our shoes would ...

A little liquorice packs quite a punch Insidious sweetness with a salty sting Black blissful oozing with a silken crunch A tooth decay...

Pied and light-footed, known by its two shades. White among corvids, dark among doves. Nesting in a ribcage of mud and twigs. Never...