Me and Pete are at them bones. It burns the hours and I can beat him, except when I don’t. We pull our kids off the street, seven to a hand. Each hidden, our game begins I play big six. “Fifteen stitches and the roof still leaks.” Pete slams six-trey so hard my ears ring. His grin is meaty. It draws me back. …
The Somnambulist, Age 4 by Yim Tan Wong
Cut loose from a clock’s single chime, she is a barefoot jockey, a silver medallion, an Olympic swimmer, wading night’s onyx wilderness. Walking the lunar beams, she is an aerialist, balancing herself with a comet’s icy tail. Also, a peripatetic psychic, saddled to June’s constellation Scorpius, whose stars scratch like stubble, whose pincers will pinch her awake as their antennae beep and translate alien electromagnetic…
Reading Your Poems Translated From Polish by Tana Jean Welch
READING YOUR POEMS TRANSLATED FROM THE POLISH— snow and origami swans were almost enough to keep me from drinking away another night. Almost like the simple beagle waving her tail is also almost enough, but I still haven’t seen those rivers or glaciers or mothers folding ribbons into flowers that make it all something better than the loud braying of after…
The Adulteress’ Requiem for the Fall by Tana Jean Welch
The local woman with Tourette’s is outside cursing our red brick building. Someone has stirred her up the way the tip of a finger can tilt the stack of dishes just enough to stir the kitchen gnats who buzz in the color of wounds. They’ve come in from the cold and even the woman, in her thawed anger, knows it’s time…
U.S. Authorities Have about 14,000 Sets of Human Remains Lacking Identification by Tana Jean Welch
The last time I saw her she was leaving. I tried to count the soft hairs on the nape of her neck as my boatman rowed her across the pond away from my personal island. There were no clouds that day. We’d just finished lunch— macaroni and cheese flavored with bacon— and a conversation: she’d made a remark about the beauty found in Oslo’s Vigeland…