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…
The Triumph of Light over Darkness, Vienna, 1904 by Tana Jean Welch
Shunned by the University for suggesting human existence consists of nothing more than the infinitely repeated cycle of birth, copulation, and death—Klimt guards his nearly finished mural with a shotgun, shouting to his detractors from the balcony of the Great Hall: “Is it my fault the jellyfish swamp the pier in Binz, captivating the young couple on their honeymoon? Is it my fault the woman’s…