Prose, Poetry, and Art since 1956
To cleanse a home of bad smells, those old burn pits from decades ago; bring to the earth and our hands large gusts of rich white billows; welcome guests, let it travel through their hair and fingers as we pass around the burner small waves of heat on our skin; expelling bad spirits on Friday mornings as my mother in a prayer garment carries the…
Under the bad neon hardware store lighting in brunch and boutique Ranelagh I flap a six-tint color swatch at my med school classmate. As if a ticket on a commuter train, nudging to get hole-punched by the conductor’s signature stencil, irregular slashes like a hasty wolf attack. “Liquid skin: cannot be unseen,” Molly warns me off slathering my bedroom in peach paint. Her ex-roommate did…
Essie’s got hair like a dried dandelion. So blonde it’s almost gray, all scraggly thin and light looking. So short you can see right through to her scalp. Sitting in the desk behind her, I like to imagine I’m blowing on the top of her head. I pretend I’m watching the little pieces of hair scatter in a thousand different directions—hair floating up to the…
Piebold, Maryellen. “Work By 15th-century Female Artist Discovered Moldering in Monastery Basement.” The Adventurous Traveler. Retrieved online: 3 May, 2019. The books on the shelves of the San Francesco sopr’Arno monastery in the Tuscan village of Sieci were almost entirely damaged by a burst water pipe in 2010 that went undetected for nearly two years. The flood ruined an estimated two hundred rare manuscripts and…
translated from the Slovenian by Brian Henry In the Morning Infidels measure their prey by the length of an oar. In every sea there’s some angel in a sunken bell. One day the Pacific Ocean will vanish. We’re making a new Pacific Ocean. It’s an enormous task. The heat is severe. The weight of all this water quenches a bit, but not enough. One must use symbolism for the launching of ships. This pleases the meek. Tomcat,…