What if, for us, there is no dark no cold dripping November spruce, no headstones, not even a name, the seasons saying relent with each drip. What if vetch and sweet pea tire of their work— honeysuckle exhausts its bloom? When the last visitor, a century ago tossed an apple it grew, but now gives…
Tag: poetry
Cascade Mall Shooting September 23, 2016
1. The day before my son was born my mom, and I took my daughter to the museum for kids. The one in the mall, with the semi-truck busting through the window, and the box of sand underground. 2. I walked the halls of that mall, empty and foreign as my body is now, void…
Watching You Sleep
Except for the rise and fall of a thin sheet/ draped across your chest, you could be dead. -Dorianne Laux, “Awake” 1. Late October morning, I watch you sleep, your arms spread, frog feet, like a crucified Jesus. I should get up, pump my breasts, sweep. I try to match my breathing to yours. I’d…
Distance
I stand beside the scarecrow and look where he looks, across the feathered gold and green, clump of trees, a single barn, a few dark lines where roads divide the fields. Clouds have crossed entire states to get here, their shadows in tow. As far as we can see is not that far, the scarecrow…
Bone
The scarecrow asks me about bones. He wants to know the feeling of them – the breakability, and the sturdy purpose of joints. He asks to touch my wrist, where the bones crowd into bumps so lightly covered, and the fused tectonics of my skull beneath its forested helmet. We speak of blood and marrow,…
Waiting for the Reveal
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…
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…
