Prose, Poetry, and Art since 1956
“Don’t get above your raising.”— Karen Salyer McElmurray Water falls intothe deep fryer, tidalingtowards my shaking hands. Singed skin still serving,brown, sprawling splatters sink ineveryone has them. From drive-thru speakers,music caught inside the car,today, Chopin plays. We work like dancersgraceful folds and tucks, buns pinned,lettuce put to bed. To argue back isto slow down, to say your paindemands us to pause. I dare love this…
Photo by Adam Bignell on Unsplash
I read an advanced copy of Ben Kline’s It Was Never Supposed to Be mere days after the 2024 presidential election was called. Meanwhile, pundits and journalists were stumbling over themselves to analyze results they found baffling, and I couldn’t help but feel that Kline’s work had already predicted its outcome. It Was Never Supposed to Be is a poetry collection, but it reads more…
Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash
Untitled I After Phil Kaye’s “Canyon” I lost contact with my obaachanfor a while. My tongue got tangledfrom gibberish versions of overhearingmom’s phone calls with her sisters and theEnglish alphabet as the sonics of kanjislipped slowly out of me, left mespeaking in haiku. I begged momto reteach me her first language but was pushedback into a white classroom with Odysseusand vocabulary lessons while the school’sspeech…