Turns out we’re back in Constantinopl, year 1453. Only this time around, the Ottoman sultan has run out of stuffing for his bronze siege cannons and what with that big chain still keeping his armada from bristling up the harbor, the sultan decides to just start catapulting dictionaries over the battlements. Hardbacks, palm-thick, they open mid-air like a flock of paper fans. Some deaths, sure,…
ODE TO OLD WOMEN AT POETRY READINGS by Michael Meyerhofer
Somehow oddly beautiful in how they park, their soft bones in libraries and coffee houses, tough to offend after six or so decades spent in toil under capitalist sky, old women who bore the sons of alcoholic war vets now dead, birth itself a kind of battle, old women whose daughters never call, who smile when pastoral poems turn erotic, who recognize that knitting…
ON MOTHER’S DAY, FOURTEEN YEARS AFTER MOM’S LAST HEART ATTACK by Michael Meyerhofer
A white farm boy turned poet turned professor cruising the aisles of the local goodwill with a two foot black ceramic Jesus in his shopping cart— A gift for my stepmom, I explain to the mocha-skinned grandmother whose blue-eyed daughters were about to snag it before I did. We all agree it’s beautiful. I don’t tell them my step-mom’s black and catholic: two things I’m…
Nothing Times Ten by Clifton Bates
I was not exactly naked but threads were pretty bare I placed three mirrors at right angles lit nine candles in a pool of shallow water pissed ten cent schooners in the shower. I squeezed a rock and ya know what I got: nothin times ten. It won’t always be like this not for ever and ever it’ll be like this jis til the…
CONSUMMATION by Michael Meyerhofer
Odd how we only kiss face to face—I want the back of my skull to know yours, I want that primordial rush of ocean when your ear mouths mine, when my navel lies on yours like a sand dollar, tails on tails. I want our ankles to rub enough fire to wet our tongues, jig to saw, turret to trench. I want our elbows to…