I. It is believed the first woman ever cut in half went uncredited for her deed. It was 1921 at London’s Finsbury Park Empire Theatre– that we do remember. We remember the magician’s name, P. T. Selbit, and that when the woman was locked inside the wooden crate, her hands, feet, and neck were knotted…
Tag: floating bridge press
merge
*Originally published in the chapbook Vanishing into the Leaves (Leaf Press, 2014). Luther Allen facilitates SpeakEasy, a community reading series, and is co-editor of Noisy Water. His collection of poems, The View from Lummi Island, can be found at http://othermindpress.wordpress.com. His work is included in the recent anthologies WA 129; Refugium, Poems for the Pacific; Poets Unite! LitFUSE @10; and Weaving the Terrain. His short…
Flagrant Delicto
Radiance is a substantial gain in problem-solving ability— a beam, a gleam, a brilliant luminosity, a schedule that feels like fractals— eligible, redundant, fancy, berry-flavored, and pungent, though less punitive to the touch, with a sound like mulch. William Pratt doesn’t think much of the luster cast by sunlight across the tombs of Kensal Green….
And what if everything
*Originally published in Sirenlit Magazine. Natasha Kochicheril Moni is the winner of the 2018 Floating Bridge Press Award, a Jack Straw Writer, and the author of The Cardiologist’s Daughter (Two Sylvias Press, 2014), Lay Down Your Fleece (Shirt PocketPress, 2017), Nearly (dancing girl press, 2018), and A Nation (Imagined) (Floating Bridge Press, 2018). Her poetry, essays, fiction, and book reviews have been published in journals including, The…
The American Museum of Telephony Burns to the Ground
O said the old wood phone mounted on the wall O no. * * * Hot breath on the receivers. Tongues wagging, bad news. Tongues licking, bad news. * * * Smell that? said a Western Electric Model 500, basic black. Hot damn, it’s smoke. Is that what smoke smells like? said a Trimline 210…
Portable Mansions
Your mother awake in the kitchen before we’ve slept, tipping a coffee mug forward—through her small frame to a window of horses & hay. She doesn’t mention the bruising, our discretion unfurled along the highway. I’ll notice it later, after losing the scarf I bought to impress you somewhere under the bed. I’ll wake up…
A Sentence on Some Movements of Flower Petals
I was wondering about the ozone layer and how no one mentions its depletion anymore when the sun came out from behind a cloud and I noticed a petal from a cherry blossom from the tree next door (where Diane used to live) floating past my window rolling like a paddlewheel and then also, at…
Moon, I Already Know
The eye as a gate to sublimity, rain begets rain as the subject— it has since become funny to apologize for anything at all. Who are you? Who are you? Begging for walk into emblem, gnashing teeth, leaves fading into green only to become compostable again, eventually. Little rose-colored pennants of the season; futurity presents…
Field of Bullets, Medicine Bow
Forty five dollars of regular unleaded. My gas tank is a graveyard on fire. Most every species that once drew breath is fossil now, or oil. If I’m to die in this latest Apocalypse, what would my body ignite? Whose escape could I fuel? Wyoming, too, is an unmarked grave and the wind shears off…
Something Came Along and Made Us Matter (green-banded broodsac to the amber snail)
I know it seems unfair, but have you seen what I look like? Teeth a flurry of cyclone, lips puckered like an asshole. I blinked to life in a puddle of excrement in skin its perfect match. Before you drank me in, I drowned a thousand siblings. Stamped my stump on their faces until their…
Add Phthalo Blue
To the lean trees, leafless, the sky awash in spirits, to rain-streaked, grayed-out wetlands. To aging winter’s illness—a cold-boned birch once silvered by the moon. Phthalo blue—bright, crystalline—stumbled upon by a chemist troubled by contamination. Its light-fastness, tinting strength, its resemblance to the blue powder childhood. Judith Skillman’s most recent book…
