fall 2021
Table of Contents
Return to Home PageSomewhere within Kostanay, Kazakhstan Justin Timbol
Making the Most of Our Voices
Ken Victor
latchkey fragments
Frances Boyle
Late August at the End of the World
Bren Simmers
No One Knows How to Be Good
Emily Kedar
Swans at the Golf Club
Ruth Daniell
On the Straightaway to the Rockies
Great Grandpa's Grain Elevator
A Nova Scotian Night Light
Ryan Smith
Upon Watching the Rotation of the Earth
Charlotte Vermue Peters
When I See Lake Water
Kristin LaFollette
i decay, bro
erica hiroko isomura
She's a Pretty Bird
Susan Zimmerman
A wrist, a wren, a small knife
Ellen Stone
Say It Delicious
Berry-Picking
Laura Cesarco Eglin
The Graveyard Metaphor for Euphoria Kaye Miller
What We Carry on a Pilgrimage
Granada, Take Three
Elena Johnson
Between Then and Then
Millicent Borges Accardi
Boy With Orange
Phillip Watts Brown
A wrist, a wren, a small knife
—after Gerald Stern
What I thought was an accordion dangling from an open window
turned out to be a man’s arm, his shirt sleeve wrinkled in the summer
evening. I thought he was handing me an air pump for my troubles,
instead, he gave me a blank check, pressing it to me with care.
What I thought was a spring bubbling from the hill by the side
of the road was instead a thin blue blazer belonging to a girl.
What I thought were a pair of shoes lying there, instead, were
her pearled feet where she lay sleeping in the fitful weeds.
What I thought was a dark apartment in the city, turned out to be
a church aisle I wandered. And the baby I thought I saw there,
an amberjack floating in a deep rock basin. What I thought was a couch
to lie on, instead was just a single cushion resting on worn stone.
*
I thought I heard a bamboo flute wending across the town.
Instead, it was cake batter spun thin inside an olive bowl.
I thought I saw a needle flash in my grandmother’s hand.
Instead, it was a camel from her Bible lying open there.
I thought I saw my brother’s jeans hanging on the line.
Instead, it was a roofing nail flashing on the shingles like a gun.
I thought I saw a gazelle loping through the chartreuse corn.
Instead, it was a ladder carved into the horse chestnut tree.
*
Whatever I was looking for—rust by the railroad, wild oats sprouting,
a boy’s hair, peat moss piled for the garden, the way the mind sponges.
My father’s sharp trowel I have carried these thirty years, a watering can.
The tire swing frayed and fallen, the windmill of my mother’s luggage.
She was a wrist, a wren in the morning grain, the scaffolding, elaborate
around her, starting to fall. Somewhere in the haze of my early days, she
rose between the geese and the geraniums, a small knife in her grasp
to peel potatoes—holding the key to our front door that never had a lock.