After the woman / tells him how that first night really went. After months pass, / and this child is born. After this child’s first birthday, / first day of school, First Communion, first love, / first loss, first child, that child’s first introduction to Grandpa.
(nonfiction)
“Faces”
“In Contemplation of an ‘Ornamental’ Banana Tree on the Grounds of a Resort While Vacationing”
“Antoine’s Graft”
“A Quiet State After Some Period of Disturbance”
“Exalted or Worthy of Complete Devotion”
“I often wondered about the effect of living with no windows.” (fiction)
“A Late Exam at the River Lethe”
“Palinode”
“Canto XXXIII”
“Canto XXXVI”
From up where we were, we hadn’t noticed the defeathered bird corpses littered down below…This friendly bird graveyard was never swept away, probably to teach us all a moral lesson. (TCTC nonfiction)
You grow very sleepy. / Then, like a breached ship / on a darkening sea, / you slip out of sight.
Every day she must locate herself, / as her neighbors need not who can lean on a world of words. / Poetry is a land she must not enter / is she is to keep her abandonment complete. (Jewish poetry)
teach me to hold truth between my teeth / like a hard lump of Russian sugar, / suck in the sweetness of integrity / with every sip of strong black tea (Jewish poetry)
there is // rushing wind at my ears and feet / as the ceiling glides above me. (Jewish poetry)
yet sometimes a child’s song, key to something / that is not, surely not, nothing, as after Patroklos is speared. (Jewish poetry)
Do you see the world / as anything more than a translucent sheet lifted / by Divine breath?
(Jewish poetry)
One by one by one / our bones come to meet you— / it’s an open house day, / we meet-and-greet new guests
(Jewish poetry)
“Really it was like possession . . . Renata is her own complete being as far as my psyche and processes know,” Frank X. Gaspar tells Millicent Borges Accardi.
“Hosking writes about her father,” says reviewer Catherine Faurot, “but his presence is felt more as a fading afterimage, a hole in the film burning incandescently.”
(poetry review)
“My son’s mind had turned against him but the need for process moved him through a different portal,” Miriam Feldman tells Tanya Ward Goodman.
His guilt was such a constant companion that a serious argument could be made for the carpool lane, the last few days rushing him like oncoming cars.
(fiction)
content warning: rape and other violent assault
At the toll, I ask, Is the tunnel very long? I’m claustrophobic in tunnels, enclosed spaces. Can’t even drive a car into a car wash.
(nonfiction)
My peoples came in on the Salvation Army ticket, right? Two rooms and a toaster, that’s about it.
(drama)
“Ghost poems of a haunted landscape, told in almost hypnotic lyricism, somehow bleed seamlessly into haunted writers and artists suffering in landscapes far from the West,” writes Sadie Hoagland.
(poetry reviews)
“I overcome the tension of trying to write by cooking. Next to smell, taste is the strongest sense in terms of conveying emotions,” Maggie Kast tells Jan English Leary.
[A year after COVID’s US arrival, ACM looks back.]
It’s not as if we don’t all know what we’re there for.
(nonfiction)
Sunbeams drop and scatter / like shrapnel across bald pavingstones asizzle / in the dust of your passing.
(poetry)
we gently break their beacons from our ankles / caress the skin where now the signals stop.
(poetry)
little teeth of pinion, / gears of language / spinning in your mouth
(poetry)
Wandering around some post-nuke safari park / With cauliflower growing out of my arm / Like a freak at night
(poetry)
“I did not live any of my life in a literary community. Holding an array of different jobs for almost thirty years, I used to think I could publish my resume as a novel,” Sari Rosenblatt tells Avani Kalra.
On our / walk the hound and I / noted something fecund.
(poetry)
What are the whereabouts of this babble of tongues, / this suicide flight of words, / this hermit-crab that is my story? (poetry)
