For Robert Nelson Drew #755, Texas Department of Criminal Justice Executed August 2, 1994, Huntsville, TX Take a star flower, Robert, and ride its petals above the prison where they killed you. Pick golden thread and sew together your heart. Pick the mayflower and let its white petals blossom each year for what might have been. Take the lady’s slippers and fit them to…
The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd by Jenna Le
Date you again? I’d rather kiss a cuttlefish, my sweet! A cuttlefish has eight long arms; you’re cursed with two left feet. You stick to Brooklyn; cuttles swim the open sea all night. When nervous, cuttles squirt black ink; your ink is pearly white.
A Song Called Shudder by Joshua Marie Wilkinson
A kitchen match could warm me here in the gossip— Here in what I’m covering my cuts for— That an eel might not drift up through the waters & find your sleep a pleasing place to live. For what’s alive set in motion an old thought lost to a bowl of broth or to an armory at the wrist— Dreaming loud,…
A Song Called Ranelagh by Joshua Marie Wilkinson
So says the dead woman in her calm ways: What won’t oppose you? What won’t actually challenge you? What won’t call your despicable behavior what it really is? Whom for for you? I was in the wet green of Ranelagh breathing beer— Breathing this briny confected air— & the islands? The nearby islands scuttled in a bit closer.
A Song Called Spinning by Joshua Marie Wilkinson
Could the living songs be heard through the transcriptions of the tape? Could the memory return with accrual? What ocean lost its cold birds of an evening to bring the flood to the stoop, the bed coils to an easement, the envelopes set open but only to the dust we might set inside them with an apprentice’s white gloves? I…