All posts tagged: Issue 28

Ponderosa

By SHANE CASTLE

Laughlin learned to hear on the hobby farm in Montana. One late afternoon, the summer he and Cassie bought the five hillside acres outside Helena, he was setting wood posts for the new corral when he heard a sound among the ponderosas toward the top of their property. It was like nothing he’d heard before. He walked up the drive toward it. A breeze was swaying the tops of the trees, and he heard it again and imagined some kind of Mylar weather balloon, blown off course, deflated, stuck in a tree. That’s what the sound was like: someone blowing a taut edge. He remembered being a kid, his family visiting Meema and Peepa at their old place on Animas Creek. He remembered Peepa teaching him and his little brother, Tyler, to blow blades of grass like kazoos. Laughlin looked and looked but found nothing. He walked a while among the tall ponderosas, at times certain he was right under it, only to look up and see nothing, and it went on this way until that moment when dusk turned to dark, when, abruptly, the sound stopped.  

Ponderosa
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Letter to Archilochus

By MAURA STANTON

              The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog
                         knows one big thing.
                                     —Archilochus, 680–645 BCE

Well, Archilochus, I guess your lyre
might help me mock, and maybe mourn, this loss—
today I broke the frosted Elvis glass
I bought at Graceland when the symposium
of poets toured the mansion.

Letter to Archilochus
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The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

By MATTHEW TUCKNER

                                          Rome, New York
                                          after Austin Araujo

In my favorite picture of you, the hair blown across
your face, obscuring your face, it’s easy to make out,
deep in the distance, the hangers of the air force base
classified as a superfund site, a sprawling huddle
of buildings expanding out into the extent of the valley.

The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
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Prelude

By KWAME OPOKU-DUKU

Was it all simply adornment,
watching the rain fall from the sun, 
or the mourning dove that carried
the wallet-sized photo in its beak?
Looking back, it was true—
I had stopped seeing the beauty in it all,
living from moment to moment, 
looking to be granted some small sense 
of pleasure, as if by respite or charity.

Prelude
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In Montgomery County

By THEA MATTHEWS

 

                              Maryland, 2020

My partner wears the panopticon,
and I carry the rope. Hungry
for the rush, the chase, we locate
the missing black calf
about two-tenths of a mile
from East Silver Spring.
He’s wearing a long-sleeve
jersey T-shirt, navy blue jeans.

In Montgomery County
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