I’m going to build a window in the middle of the street in order to not feel lonely. I will plant a tree in the middle of the street, and it will grow to the astonishment of the passersby. I’ll raise birds that will never flit to other trees, and they will remain perched and chirping to the surrounding noise and general disinterest. I’ll grow an ocean framed within the window.
By ANGELA VERONICA WONG, AMY LAWLESS
Let’s just see if it fits, and your voice blurred, your hand brushing away mine, me laughing because seriously who says that? I flashed out of my body picturing you saying this to other girls, and laughed again.
Dear Johnny,
In your last letter, you requested
. Take my photograph down, you wrote. Disremember.
Yesterday M started talking. All at once, as if inside, she had alphabets that ached to break
out. We were and relieved. We it would never happen. Johnny, the
tomato plant takes water as if in love, and a map upside down is still a map. The arrows,
, . I’ve
. placed Europe above the . It hangs like our .
Every morning, I
. I trace where you could be: Newbury, Canterbury, ,
Maidstone, Kent. will bring you to another place: Merville, Pas de Calais, Caen,
. You are pushing through fields. In , one cloud like an apology. I
think the word verdant, and it brings me closer to . I the word tomorrow. It
a falling body. . Johnny, I am busy history.
We were climbing a hill in . The ice soaked through our mittens. I
. You . Johnny, the ocean has salt
enough without your blood. I feel your hurried fear, tendoned and tight. You make your
body small. We split at what seems . We
. Johnny, .
There are so many spaces my body needs filled. Love, your dark-haired
doll.
i
By the shadowless, lion-bluff of Pigeon
Island, you have gone swimming, a clear
afternoon, children’s faint play noise ring
in the yard
It was a boy named Pierre Powell
that was in charge of the atlas
in the cabinet. He also ended days
by shaking the iron bell from principal
William’s window, a work we grudged
him for very little
By SETH PERLOW
Dear future self, when you read this
will they have abolished the yellow
light, or merely changed its function?
Where I come from, we have a color
for Sort-of-stop, but no way to express
Sort-of-go.
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