“Oh my God, I’m so pleased to see you,”
she says from her nest of blankets.
“I’ve been meaning to ask—
How is your father?
How is Paddy?”
You fitted so snugly
through the window I opened wide for you.
Then you shut it with a bang giving me your back.
The shards, too small, took forever to gather.
I put them in that wooden bowl you made.
If after a few weeks you find yourself coughing,
your chest laced in a corset of steel,
tell your doctor you were here.
Tell him about the bats, their investment in the dark,
their droppings spongy fudge
which you probably tramped on in the cave,
the spores you may have breathed
now inhabiting your lung tissue,
taking all your breath
for the growing fungus
inside you.
By AMELIA GRAY
Not enough snow to stick, Mother says. A pissing thin layer of the saddest slick. Even the road made visible underneath. Used to be you could die in a winter, wander right off the road and dead in a field before you had your second thought, but these days everyone gets to their destination. Have you ever arrived in a springtime with your entire family intact?
He or she was hard-wired
to calculate
in nanoseconds, light years; to climb
summit to summit above
the squat mud settlements, and oversee
the pyramid poised on pyramid
By RACHEL HADAS
It seems I had to come this far to see
a puppy rooting in a pile of garbage,
scarlet blossoms on a poinsettia tree.
By RACHEL HADAS
In Richard’s attic, I
swung on a swing suspended from a rafter
and listened to two fables
read by my host in a voice that sometimes broke.
By DENIS HIRSON
and it all begins
and it will never cease
—Mxolisi Nyezwa
This story begins on a lake in the Berkshires, up among the low hills and wild blue turkeys and deep woods, up in the northeast before you get to Canada. There I am with my daughter, pulling a rowing boat out across the sand and onto the weed-thick water.
When I saw the man tuck the boy
under his arm like a chicken
or a football, it made me
remember how after one week
of pre-season my youngest declared
his body was all wrong,
insufficient to take down boys
he needed taken down
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Celebrating 15 Years