Prose, Poetry, and Art since 1956
After Manahil Bandukwala’s “Petrify” Your body did not decompose into dust but began a slow petrification.There was no stench of rot, no flies birthed in your skin, only a rough texture forming. The rough texture forming across your skin dried you out, grating my flesh every time I tried to stir you, to bring color back to the veins that disappeared. Your veins disappeared and were…
Balancing personal truths against the raw realities of American society can seem impossible in today’s political climate, where ideas about truth and justice often feel up for debate, and an issue’s relevancy seems determined by the number of likes it receives on Instagram. Yet debut author Sean Enfield, in his wildly experimental and poignant essay collection Holy American Burnout!, released in December 2023 by Split/Lip…
I. Theo Opening again the arrantcorrespondence—relief of the sown fields,bread of affliction:a restless brother burnshis way to harvest,painting space as thing,as woodcut furious,flinders of fire and leaf,heavy, sun-dense strokes, dark notes dealingfor fugitive effects;a red brother workingpetitions for more room, more light, aches of vision given the gleaning, its price: close the correspondence—which love deserving silencewhich brothers, being divided, unrelieved. II. Gauguin A sunburned man wants all the smoke.Hot with other people’s…
1 Childless and widowed, I slide into bed like a bug that scuttles away to escape getting stomped. I am not a bug but I am flattened. By loneliness, worry, missing my boy, now grown. By the encroaching fog of my father’s dementia. Years ago, his mother made the quilt that covers me. Age and love have beaten it soft. It covered my bed in…
Nothing has waited for me. The river shrugs its fog shawl. Fisher birds shriek, light whitewing flecks of untouched watercolor paper, watchful of what bubbles in the ink. From a forgetful distance I’m returning to beauty out of harsh grief, ugly, out of breath or practice. Returning is the decision to live. Or. Returning is the discoverynothing has waited for me. Mass graves were never found here onlybecause no one looked. Burials…