Early in the morning the hallways of the Cancer Institute were so empty and quiet, they seemed nowhere near the crowded city of Belgrade, but in another world. While Slavka cleaned the gray linoleum floor, she felt she was navigating a giant...
Prelude: Howling from the Suburbs 2001-2008
I I saw the best minds of my gender destroyed by material madness, gorging hysterical spandex, hauling their Hummers, dragging children up and down Wisteria Lanes, seeking 100% money-back guaranteed certainty, happiness, Who sliced and served...
Outside King Soopers: Homelessness and Awkward Intimacies
“Elizabeth, if I tell you something, will you please not be offended?” I raise an eyebrow. “If you were nineteen, I’d totally be hitting on you.” I notice that he’s got a careful margin past the age of consent there. “Well, I guess we’re...
Two Poems By Patty Seyburn
Just Tell Me You’ll Think About It Kurt Vile on the radio trending sings “Pretty Pimpin’” and neither his assumed name or his song refer in any way to Kurt Weill and “The Threepenny Opera” – Vile’s back-up band called “The Violators.” He used to...
We Value Your Memories
My wife has friended a coyote. Facebook keeps sending me messages from a slightly other world where a blind guy like myself jumps at the chance to buy expensive watches, cheap car insurance and a surveillance system for his cornfields. It’s a real...
The Brexit Bus Stop 31.10.2039
I waited for the bus. The first bus didn’t arrive for a while. I waited beneath a blood-red sun, sweating and exhausted. It was the first time in twenty years that I’d stood at a bus stop; the last time was on the last day of October in 2019. Brexit...
Three Poems By Dawn Potter
Walking into Town this road is empty for most of the day but when the log trucks whip over the ridge jake-breaking belching diesel then watch out deer the soot-stained sky glowers snow is on the way snow is always on the way & the tar is always...
First Day Back
I don’t hear the shots anymore , but I can still feel them. I feel them in every movement; each thought and perception is formed by them. I feel quite a lot, at the most dangerous times. Walking into school today, I noticed how the green and...
INFRASTRUCTURE
Whoosh like a river moving but it’s a highway of electricity making its way along strung lines. Teams and teams of men did this, forged and hung rubbery, waterproof cables. The chemicals it took: plastic coating and metal filaments to carry our...
Seasonal Elegies
My mother is sick, my best friend was dying; I had to travel quite a bit this winter—Vermont, North Carolina, Minnesota, Oregon, Massachusetts. And yet the way chain stores nudge a landscape into a kind of global uniformity, there was a...
Two Poems By Peter Schmidt
Starling Shout-Out About 60 common starlings were released in 1890 into New York’s Central Park by Eugene Schieffelin. He was president of the American Acclimatization Society, which tried to introduce every bird species mentioned in the works of...
CHIAROSCURO
Minutes on trains are longer than rivers. This, Chiara knows. It’s only two hours from Naples to Rome, but gazing at the grasses and soft vanilla clouds, it feels as if years have passed. Chiara sighs at the glass.“Are you sure we can’t go swimming...